File I/O Errors and great green renders

I am having a few problems on my FCP5 system.I am running a Dual 2ghz Mac with 2.5gb of ram and my media is coming off RAID drives.
I have tried restarting, i have tried FCP rescue aswell(Which i believe backs up and then trashes your pref's which you can restore later). What happens is, whilst trying to playback the timeline i get dropped frames, severely. it cant play back any whole clip because of this, i changed the preview settings to 'low' and am still getting the same problems(it was on dynamic with Safe RT)I am editing in 8-bit uncompressed. when i try and scrub over certain clips(the one i tried was a final cut text clip with a matte background) it keeps repeating a "file i/o error" error on every frame advance. Then when rendering clips within final cut it renders green video, i even track down the actual render file with finder, and play it in quicktime and still get green video. The weird thing is that it was working fine 4 days ago, the last time it was on, and the same project was running perfectly...

Okay, things just got weirder, whilst writing this i decided to try and import some other media into final cut and it wont play back, it previews it either as green, or grey with pink, green, yellow dots.. any idea's?

Did you back up your preferences with FCP Rescue before doing a restore? If so, you backed up the bad prefs and then reinstalled them.

Try dumping your prefs altogether and starting fresh. Bright green video often means corruption in the line somewhere.

Hi Jude, I believe that is what happened.

I have trashed the prefs manually and started afresh,now I manage to carry on working again, but about ten minuters in i start getting the same errors and the same problems. I currently have a ten minute workflow.. start final cut, wait for errors whilst working,get errors, quit fcp, restart final cut after trashing prefs...work for ten minutes.repeat.

I would reinstall final cut but i'm working freelance on someone else's system..and they happen to be away ....on holiday...

I think there's something wrong with your media drive, your project file, or both. Multi-coloured distortions in the Canvas point to corruption. First thing you should try is to copy everything in your project file to a brand-new project file, then ditch all render files. If the problems persist, move the materials one at a time to a new project file and see if you can locate the culprit. If that doesn't work, disconnect all your media and then reconnect it.

You said the project was working until four days ago. Do you remember what you did four days ago? Did you import any new media? If so, I'd try to get rid of or re-convert that media and see if the project file recovers.

Ack, nasty. Try opening a fresh project and copy pasting just the sequence you are working on into it. Does this help?

Is the machine networked, by the way?

Oh, also. dump your quicktime prefs.