Both my business partner and I occationally get a "jigsaw" effect on our video monitors during FCP edit. Shutting down and booting up again oftentimes helps, but when you are editing a 90 minute, 300 GB piece that takes a chunk out of your day when you have to do it 3x.

The monitors have grey "jigsaw puzzle" looking pieces that go over our images and we can only see the actual (full) image about every 20 frames.

Larry Jordan, FCP master, doesn't even know what I"m talking about. Are any of you familiar??

THANKS!

I'm not familiar with jigsaw puzzles in Final Cut Pro by a long stretch, but I can always try. Here's what I can think of:

a) Are you running some kind of strange screensaver :-) ?
b) Are the puzzle pieces all over the screen or only over the canvas and viewer?
1. If they're all over the screen you may have a hardware problem. Make sure the machine is not overheating and check if the graphics card is firmly seated.
2. If they're only over the canvas and viewer and look like this ( http://benderydt.com/tmp/puzzle%20pieces.jpg ) you have a problem somewhere in the proces that starts when the footage gets picked from disk, decoded and ends when it's displayed. It could be that you have a faulty disk (maybe overheating), it could be that you have a bad connection between the disks and the machine or it could be that your Quicktime and or Final Cut Pro installation is fubar-ed.

Can you give more information? What kind of machine, what kind of disks, what kind of footage?