[Ron Gibbs]

Not certain if this will help or not (your system sounds far more advanced than mine) … but info from Apple help area indicated that on CAPTURE (didn’t mention write to tape) that Spotlight was causing dropped frames in OSX 10.4.9. Fix was to put the Capture Scratch folder in the Spotlight (PRIVACY TAB in the System Prefs) … I was having all kinds of dropped frame problems, and put the entire drives that I was using in the Spotlight privacy area, and they all went away. Maybe you need to do the same for your rendered file outputs? Just a thought.