• I'm trying to sync my audio to a QuickTime movie in Cubase SX, but it's not showing the video's thumbnails correctly across the track. Why?
• Is the Frame Rate setting in Cubase SX important if I'm not locking to video?

I'm trying to sync my audio to a QuickTime movie in Cubase SX, but it's not showing the video's thumbnails correctly across the track. Why?

Cubase SX allows a video track of thumbnails to be displayed across the project window as quick reference to what's taking place in the video during any part of the music. This requires a bit of memory to perform well, and there is a setting in the preferences you need to adjust if your thumbnail images aren't appearing as they should.

Open the Video Page of the Event Display Preferences via Preferences under the File Menu. You should see a setting for Video Cache Size. This cache allocates memory for use by video thumbnail image tracks. If your video clips are fairly long, you'll probably have to adjust this value until your video thumbnail images appear as they should.

This value will also need to be increased if you work with large zoom settings, which tend to require the machine to render more thumbnail images across the zoomed out time line. You can also play back video clips in Cubase SX by importing the video file to a Video Track.

For Windows machines, you'll probably only need to select Direct Show or Video in the Video Playback Engine dialog box, which is found in the Video Player Page of the Device Setup Menu. PCs can run QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media Video and MPEG formats. Macs can play AVI, MPEG, QuickTime and DV Formats. In either case you'll need to have QuickTime already installed on your computer to run the QuickTime files.

Is the Frame Rate setting in Cubase SX important if I'm not locking to video?

The Frame Rate setting only applies to syncing to video and MIDI Time Code (MTC). If you're slaving Cubase SX to an external time code, the Frame Rate setting in the Project Setup dialog should automatically be reflected when the program senses incoming time code. If you are running Cubase SX as a master to slave devices, you can select which time code is appropriate in the Project Setup Dialog box.

There is a user-definable frame rate setting in the Display Format pop-up box for adjusting the rulers in the session window to show sample accurate measurements. Make sure this setting reflects the FPS in the Project Setup dialog box. The 60 FPS (user) option is useful for storing a common or custom user setting.

Open the Transport page in the Preferences section of the main File menu in Cubase SX. Enter the desired frame rate in User Definable Frame rate and click OK. From this time forward, this frame rate will be shown on the rulers in the session's display when you select the 60 FPS (user) option in the Display Format pop-up box.