Final Cut Pro 4: High Quality Option Doesn‘t Appear in RT Pop-Up Menu

On some PowerPC G4-based desktop and portable computers, the high quality option only appears in the Timeline's RT pop-up menu if the computer's microprocessor is fast enough to perform real time effects at high quality (Figure 1). The computer's microprocessor speed and the selected video format determines if the option appears or not.



Figure 1 High quality option selected in RT pop-up

Note: When a sequence is rendered, playback to a video device is always at "high" quality, even if the RT pop-up menu does not indicate that option.

Minimum requirements for the RT pop-up menu to display the High Quality option:

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

• DV25 30fps:
  • Desktop at 500 MHz
  • PowerBook at 667 MHz
• DV50 30fps:
  • 800 MHz with cache
  • 1 GHz no cache
  • Any dual-processor computer

Mac OS X 10.2 with QuickTime 6.4

• DV25 30fps:
  • 800 MHz with cache
  • 1 GHz no cache
  • Any dual-processor Power Mac G4
• DV50 30fps:
  • 800 MHz with cache,
  • 1 GHz no cache
  • Any dual-processor Power Mac G4

Mac OS X 10.2 with QuickTime 6.3

• DV25 30fps:
  • 800 MHz with cache,
  • 1 GHz no cache,
  • Dual processor at 800 MHz
• DV25 30fps:
  • 800 MHz with cache
  • 1 GHz no cache
  • Dual processor at 800 MHz