[Steve Smith]

I did. Though I had been assured that the base nvidia GT 120 graphics card was all that was required in these machines, that is not the case. If you look on the apple site they are no longer selling the new mac pro’s with the GT 120. I went with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and all the issues went away

[Steve Smith]

I should mention that I have two identical final cut machines and a third that is running OS X 10.5 with Final Cut studio 3 with a AJA Kona LH card. I have just run the test on this machine and again it drop frames on the jpeg slate but does not continue to stutter as the other 2 machines that do not have a video card. Does this mean that I will need to consider a video card to handle the encoding better?

[Steve Smith]

I have been rendering the slate out as prores to get around this issue.
The jpeg is 1920 x 1080 RGB image so I would not call that large and yes I agree I am not convinced that this issue is symptom of a bigger issue. At present my sequences are no longer that 10 minutes but they will get bigger and generally I will only keep 3 or 4 sequences open at any one time. The esata raid performs faultlessly and to eliminate this as a issue I used the internal raid 0 disk set and this gave the exact same results.
I have re set my user preferences, tried several test projects, remade the jpeg and it still seems to be the the one consistent point at which things brake. Ordinarily I would maybe claim that as a fix but I was hopeful that some one else would have seen this behaviour to confirm my findings

[Steve Smith]

OK so I have just un-installed my kona drivers and all of the digital cinema display option have returned. I then installed kona drivers v5 and all the option disappeared this was also the same in v5.1. I then installed the 5.1NDD the latest and gratest kona have to offer. This WORKS all of my option have returned and work as they should.
I cannot be sure but this does look like a kona version issue, certainly the OS v10.5.2 is part of this as is quicktime v7.4.1. Though I have to say I find the kona site confusing given what they say about v5.1NDD
https://www.aja.com/html/support_konaLHe_swd.html

“This 5.1 NDD version is recommended for OS X 10.5.2 users. Note: The AJA
KONA driver version 5.1 NDD is the same as driver version 5.1, but removes
the Macintosh Desktop Display feature.”

Thanks for the help all, this case is closed

[Steve Smith]

thanks Warren
I will give that a go

[Steve Smith]

Thanks Jerry
Will try this tomorrow