after reading at the link you gave (thanks) I tried "if 3 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout" but all that does is stop monitoring the process, which means that if the process does actually go down monit will not restart it, which is not the result I want. The whole point of monit (for me) is to restart a stopped process.
In my case the process in question is ffmpeg and it takes a good 5 seconds for the process to come up an start running. What I need is for monit to delay for say 10 seconds before checking the pid but I can't see a way to do that.