Dropped Frames During Playback

[Bacon12]

Hey, so I'm absolutely new to editing, I hardly know any terms and I've only owned a mac and final cut for a month, so my problems are probably basic and will make me feel awful for not figuring it out myself, but I digress. Pretty much, whenever I add any edit, be it overlaying text on a video, adding transitions, slowing down a clip, I get the dropped frames during playback error. So far, that has been the only error message I've encountered and all the forum posts I've read about it don't explain my issue (unless I'm missing something, because I don't know all the terminology and whatnot). I got this stuff to work a few times but it was after much fiddling and I had no idea what I did in the end to make it work. Can anyone help me with this problem? Any help is appreciated.

In short, how do I make crossfades and other edits to work without the dropped frames error?

[Thurston Lang]

when you have overlays and 'stuff' going on...... when you preview video (that is - you play it without rendering it in the timeline first) you will get a dropped frames error unless you toggle the 'RT' playback option in preferences.

The other answer is to render your timeline - so go to 'sequence' and then choose the 'render all' option.