Hello,
I'm working on a 2 * 3.2 GHZ Quad-Core INtel Xeon with 12 GB of memory on MAC OSX 10.6.5. This machine is fast! We're working with a Raid, capture cards, black-magic, etc.

However, as of late, my final cut has been pretty buggy.

This machine recently has had problems ingesting footage that normally it doesn't have a problem with (HD CAM SR 1080i60). What happens is that it drops frames and refuses to capture a clip.

I tried safe boot and rebuilding permissions, trashing the preferences, letting UNIX utilities to run in the background, checking disk space (all good), upgrading the operating system, etc.

If FCP still drops frames what do you suppose the problem could be? I'm not sure how to check to see if the capture cards and drivers are updated. How do you do that?

What state are your drives in? Are they getting full? Has there been any change to your drive set up (adding an external drive, etc)?
And is Final Cut really dropping frames? It sometimes puts up the warning but if you look at the clip, all is OK.

Final Cut is doing all sorts of weird things from dropping frames to capturing video and audio out of sync. I'm convinced that this is related to our server being too full. But when I tried capturing to the scratch disk of the computer (in 2 different computers- mind you), the computers freeze and all that comes up on the capture display is a gray box and that spinning rainbow circle of death.
Have any ideas?

This is a problem if two different computers are having capture issues when working with them as stand-alone systems. Is there a staff person who set up the systems and server? Go to them first but if there isn't anyone on contract to fix problems like this, my first suggestion is to remove one of the systems from the server network completely and see if you still have capture problems. Also what model of computer are we dealing with here, OS version and FCP version? And what are the drive set-ups within the stand-alone computer?