Stuttering playback question

I'm experiencing stuttering playback problems with an old project I'm revisiting. I started a cut of a short doc on my home system, got distracted for a couple of months, and have returned to polish it off.

Basically, every time I press play, the footage stutters, audio skips, and the picture lags out of sync.

The source footage is DVCPRO HD 1080p30 running off a 750 GB internal drive. When I took my first pass on the project, the drive was a little over half full. In the intervening months, the drive got filled up to 90% full. Before getting back into it, I cleared the drive back off to about 60% full. I've set the RT playback to safe & low quality, and I still get audio stuttering and skipping.

My questions are:

Did filling up the drive contribute to the problem? Is this a symptom of impending drive failure?

Is there some drive optimizing process that might solve this? Or do I just move the footage to a FW800 drive that I have standing by?

Basic system specs: FCP 7.0.whatever the latest update is. Mac Pro 2.66 duocore, 4 GB ram

Thanks!

Jeff

Hey, nevermind!

Was playing my footage back without my Matrox output attached. My system was looking for it, it wasn't attached, voila unhappiness.

I don't know if I'm brilliant for figuring it out, a moron for it being something so stupid, or both. But if I'm a happy idiot, maybe that's good enough, right?

I think you're ultra-brilliant for posting your result and possibly helping someone else that might need that information. Thanks

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Figuring out a problem without somebody else's help? Sounds like good troubleshooting to me.

You'll be surprised how many times even experienced troubleshooters can overlook a simple solution like, say, unhooking a device!


www.derekmok.com

I'll share with you some wisdom that I learned about fifteen years ago from one of the smartest guys I've ever met:

"If you work on a problem for more than ten minutes without making any progress, it's a cable."