Capturing on OS 10.4.9
 

Okay, my system has worked beautiful before now I'm having dropped frames and I see the upgrade may be the problem. How do I fix this?

I'm on a power Mac G4, 120G Hard drive, Lacie 250g external firewire drive connected to a Belkin hub (unplugged the hub and plugged it in again), 2 gigs ram running FCP 3.

You guys have been great in the past, don't let me down now. :-)

Hmm, lots of issues with FCP 3 vs newer versions of MacOS X and Quicktime. What version of MacOS X were you running before? I'm surprised that you weren't having problems before. I don't think you will find very many kindred souls here still using FCP 3 unfortunately. Have you tried Apple's support forums here? http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=939

Aside from that, FCP 3 is really a dog in terms of performance, version 4 was a big improvement on the same hardware.

Boyd, not sure what I had previous, how can I check if possible?

What version of MacOS X 10.4 did you buy (obviously your G4 wasn't shipped with 10.4 :-)? You could try downgrading by re-installing from the physical media (DVD's). I've never tried this, but think it can be done.

(edit) To see what was updated and when, go to the top level of your hard drive then open the Library Folder, then the Logs folder. There should be a file called Software Update.log. Open that file and you will see this history of software which has been updated on your computer.