Hi,

I have had this problem for a while now and have recently upgraded to Tiger and FCP 5.1.1 thinking that the problem would go away but it hasn't. Basically what is happening is if I capture or render and am not at the computer to save it the minute is has finished the task, the screen freezes, the mouse disappears, I cannot even force quit. So I basically lose all my capuring and redering and have to redo it. It is such a major pain as I am constantly having to do work 2 or 3 times over. This has started to happen since using my G-Sata drive, but I have re-formatted this in the past but it has made no difference.

If anybody has any suggestions I would be very grateful as this is incredibly time consuming and frustrating. Thanks.

I have no confidence in G-Tech drives and since you said it started after you introduced it into your workflow, I would first remove, it and see what happens.

Next, if you are not familiar with FCP maintenance, look at the stickies at the top of this forum to learn how to trash preferences for FCP.

How well do you maintain OS X? It doesn't require nearly as maintenance as windows but some regular housekeeping helps.

Try this, reboot while holding down the shift key until the blue screen appears, not the grey apple screen, but the blue screen. This will enable "Safe Mode". Doing so will take longer to boot but what it does is rebuild some OS X stuff which I don't know the details of, but is recommended as a starting place for trouble shooting. Next go to Application>Utilities>Disk Utility and run permissions repair on you boot drive. After that, reboot your Mac normally and see how things run.

Visit larryjordan.biz and look for articles on FCP/OS X maintenance. It's a great site.

Last resort is to reformat and re-install your system and software.

Thanks for the info. I will try what you said. I am literally in the middle of editing a huge 9 hour project so once it is done I will remove the "posibly offending hard drive" and see what happens.
Also, what kind of housekeeping should I be doing to OS X?
Thanks again.