Poof and it's gone!

I am a video manager for an international charity. What that really means is I have to fulfil all the production roles on a tight budget. About a year ago we purchased a Mac Pro from a well known UK Mac/video specialist to edit HDV footage in FCP.
The spec of the Mac is as follows:
Mac Pro - 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
4GB Ram (2 x 1GB {presumably Apple} + 1 x 2GB Kingston module)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3
1 x 320GB 7200rpm Serial ATA + 3 x 750GB 7200rpm SATA 16MB Cache HDD
AJA Kona He SD/HD PCI Express Video Interface
The system was preloaded with Apple Final Cut Studio 2 and Leopard OS X (currently using v10.5.6.)
Note that a AJA Kona card was purchased not only to allow component breakout to a HD TV, but also to assist with HDV handling (at least that's what the supplier informed us).
When the Mac first turned up everything was fine for about 3-4 days of solid use. Thereafter it started to crash more and more regularly, up to 10 times in the average working day. By crash I mean I would get the spinning beachball for a few seconds and then FCP would vanish and I'd be left with the standard "The application Final Cut Pro quit unexpectedly" dialogue box.
I lived with it for a while and then one day FCP just wouldn't open and so we went back to the suppliers who eventually took it into their workshop and did various hardware tests.
Sadly I was without an edit machine for nearly 3 weeks, which really knocked my budget. None of the tests revealed the fault and eventually they formatted and reinstalled everything and handed the Mac back to us saying 'see how you get on now'.
Since they couldn't find any faults we were charged for their investigations. They did say if it continued they would have it back in again for even more intensive investigation and we'd get a refund if the fault turned out to be hardware related.
When the Mac came back it was fine for about 2 or 3 days and then the crashing started again. I kept a log of the circumstances of every crash.
A good 80% of the time they occured in this scenario. I will have about 2-3 sequences open/tabbed on the timeline. One will be my main edit the other two will have all my rushes/footage split across them for me to scrub back and forth through. It is often when scrubbing on any of the sequences that I get the beachball and subsequent crash. The other 20% of crashes have occurred during rendering, applying a video filter to a clip, exporting to QuickTime, closing a sequence tab.
The crashes tend not to occur in the early stages of a project, i.e. when blocking clips on the timeline to create a Rough Cut. It's only when I start applying transitions and effects that they tend to occur.
Overall my conclusion would be that they're linked to intensive processing of larges amount of data. But here's the interesting thing on a regular basis the crashes start half way through the day and will occur much more frequently after the first daily crash.
Quite a few times I have looked at the error report that is sent off to Apple. It's mostly gobbledegook to me but this line did stick out "EXCBADACCESS (SIGSGV)".
I would really appreciate it if someone can give me a clue to what's behind all this.
Thx
Nigel.

Hello there, Noddy Dog,
Crashes are difficult to analyze, but let's begin:
the crashes start half way through the day and will occur much more frequently
after the first daily crash
That sounds like a memory leak, i.e. a software problem.
It is good practice to do a reboot after a crash.
Are you running the most recent version of FCS, QuickTime, etc.?
Are you running the most recent version of the AJA driver?
http://www.aja.com/html/supportkonaLHeswd.html
Is the KONA card properly installed?
http://www.aja.com/html/supportkona_recsys.htm
Are your disks configured as a RAID? If so, what kind?
Are you editing in HDV?
You might consider capturing to ProRes rather than staying in HDV.
Here's how when using Firewire; the information may be useful to you:
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/poisson_chris/hdv-prores.php
HDV does ask a lot of your processor, which is one reason FCP offers
the option of capturing direct to ProRes.
I hope this is of some help.
Les

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