Video cliches/dropped frames? Hard wear problem?

[dga3240]

Hello,I am new here so if this is in the wrong section, please forgive me. I have an annoying problem with my 27" mid 2010 iMac with what appear to be dropped frames in playback. To make this clear, videos played in the camera (PD150) plays fine, as are archived videos, but the same footage viewed on the player in iMovie or FCPX has what appear to be "dropped frames" (i.e. regular glitches or pauses) every 6 or so seconds. There are also other problems with the computer (links, passwords, iMovie editing, and tools not working as they are meant to do, etc. which leads me to believe this is a hardware issue.

Dropped frames (which this is NOT) are commonly blamed on slow hard discs and this is what I thought at first. So I installed a SSD in the CD/optical drive bay. That has not changed things and the problems have just got progressively worse. This Mac has plenty of storage and memory and I've uploaded a fresh copy of High Sierra.

I have now reached the stage where I either have to buy a new s/h computer or get this one repaired. And the latter means that I will have to consider doing that myself by replacing defective boards.

Has anyone seen this problem before? Can anyone give me a clue where to start looking? How difficult/practical/expensive is it going to be? I have videos waiting editing and really need to get back to work! Thank you.

 

[sevoneone]

Did you leave the suspect hard drive connected when you installed your SSD in the optical bay? If it is experiencing problems it can bog down the system even if it is not the boot drive. The excess I/O error entries in the system logs from a decaying hard drive can eat enough CPU and writes to your SSD to rob performance like this.