Firstly, m329 is pretty ancient - m364 is generally accepted as the 'official release'. I would use this as a matter of course over m329 any day.

Olli is correct that you should NOT use the system disk for playback.
You do not mention which capture card you use - that's kind of significant.

You should absolutely not use AVC1 encoded footage with Catalyst - this is h264/ MPEG4 content which is totally unsuitable for use with Catalyst. Catalyst works best with codecs that use intraframe compression which use spatial compression only and not interframe compression codecs like MPEG-2, H264, MPEG-4, which use both spatial and temporal compression. Intraframe compression Quicktime codecs are DV, Apple Intermediate Codec, Photo-Jpeg, Animation, ProRes. Although a lot of people still use Apple Intermediate Codec, I personally prefer ProRes - even ProRes Proxy, which is the 'lightest weight' ProRes Codec looks better than AIC, and has better Chroma subsampling and bit depth. It also performs extremely well on modern Mac Pros.

Hugh