I have found some other behavior which I will detail in a moment. I agree that AJA should be involved in the solution of this issue and I have sent them a DVD illustrating the problem – I should be on the phone with them tomorrow trying to de-bug the system. I will post the outcome of that call here.
Comments to rest of thread:
1- I have found that the stuttering problems is alway terrible the first time I play back a section AFTER rendering. Playing it a second time produces greatly reduced stutter errors, and playing it a third time produces an almost perfect playback (but there is ALWAYS a minor error somewhere). It’s almost as if somewhere the program is indexing files to the timeline playlist. Estremely peculiar
Another symptom I have observed is that when the machine stutters, it literally stutters on the timeline, momentarily freezing TC output and monitor outputs.
2- I have all my media files pointed at that RAID, so there are no files on separate drives that could slow down the system.
3- I have also experienced the field based jittery video that Butch refers to. As with his experience, it only happened when bringing in video via FireWire. If I brought in the video from the same machine via an analogue source, the video was fine. What I found was that I only got the field jittering problem when importing firewire from my old Sony DSR-11. I have replaced that machine with a new HVR-1500 and have had no problems with importing via FireWire, Analog or SDI. I would do a test with a different machine and see if you have the same experience.