FPS

A plug-in that measures the current playback performance, in frames-per-second. Its purpose is purely informational, giving you an estimate of how well your system can keep up with the complexity of your timeline. It is best used through the title or adjustment layers in both Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, since that ensures that all content below the title or adjustment layer is being rendered and thus accounted for.

Please note that caching behaviors may prevent this plug-in from making accurate measurements. When using Final Cut Pro, it is best disabling the Backround render option under Settings → Playback:

Background render

Failure to disable that option will cause one or both these problems: when playing back a partially pre-rendere timeline, the true cost of rendering each clip will not be reflected; the FPS track itself may be pre-rendered and cached, making it impossible to view new performance metrics.

When the current playback performance is at least 75% of the media’s own frame rate, the FPS indicator is displayed in green. When playback performance is between 50% and 75% of the target frame rate, the indicator appears orange. When the frame rate drops below 50%, the indicator turns red.