Hi all,

What is the least powerful Mac I can use to edit hdv? I am just talking about cutting up and placing clips. No effects, no transitions.

example: Can a PB G4 1.33Ghz with 1GB ram handle it?

Thanks,

Scott

To give you a baseline I guess, I have a 2GHz G5 with 3GB of RAM and it edits HDV OK... but I use a lot color correction and some simple transitons (fades, dissolves...) on 1080i 60.

I used FCP 4 on my Powerbook once... an old G4 1GHz Powerbook with 1GB of RAM, and it was sluggish even with SD video, never tried HDV on it, but I doubt it could run it.

You might could turn the settings down, but I've never really tried on anything other than my G5, and I've since gotten rid of the Powerbook.

Even with my G5 I'm looking into upgrading to a newer faster Mac, but I'm also impatient :)

I use a 1.5ghz G4 1.5G ram laptop with 720p HDV material and its ok. it will edit and place clips into a TL as you say. its also good for loading with.I can usually get dissolves, but just about anything else requires rendering. I think the 3-way CC sort of sluggishly works.

in 1080 though might be more than it can really process without becoming so sluggish it won't be worth your time. might be ok for loading.

You could probably just do straight cuts with almost no effects. My crappy little 867mhz G4 Powerbook with 768mb RAM can capture HDV successfully and put the clips in a timeline. My crappy 1.6ghz G5 with 1.25gb RAM has a tough time doing anything over-the-top as well.

I have a new 2 x dualXeon 2.66 GHz mac Pro with 5 GB of RAM, and it still takes 1.5x real time to render edits from AIC to HDV at the end + real time to write the tape of course.

So while lesser machines can edit HDV material, using intermediate codecs (to preserve the quality and to make editing faster) puts a lot of strain on the hardware when you want get the material out of the machine.

Just something to consider, if buying a PC for HDV editing.

I've got a intel I-mac with a G-Raid Firewire 800 drive... 1 gig of memory was good.. bumped up to 3 gigs of memory with modest improvement. Works very well. Did some HD with my mom's original macbook with 512 memory. it captured and did simple edits.

I would get a small I-mac and a G-Raid external Firewire Drive. (or any other firewire 800 RAID or at least just an external Firewire 800 or 400 drive) I do JVC HDV 720p with a 6 GOP instead of say Canon/Sony 1080i with a 15GOP, so that might also make a big difference.

On the Final Cut site it says the minimum requirement for compressed HD footage (HDV) is 2 GB of RAM and uncompressed is 4 GB of RAM. You should seriously think about upgrading if you can.

I know someone who got a macbook, and it turns out it those can't even run the new final cut! So beware.