Hi All,

I'm going to be starting on a new project shortly, and I'm wondering whether I need to upgrade my hardware. I'm currently on a G4 DP 1.0 GHz, 1.5GB RAM, Radeon 9800, with a 240GB ATA RAID 0 as my video drive.

I understand that the hardware requirements for HDV are more significant and that Apple says:

"HD features require 1GHz or faster single or dual processors (authoring HD DVDs requires a PowerPC G5 or Intel Core Duo processor)"

But what is the real performance like on a G4? Is it usable? Do you get frequent dropped frames?

I'm slightly reluctant to jump to Intel until Bitvice is a Universal Binary, amongst other things...

Thanks,
Andrew.

Quite frankly, the difference between a G5 dual 2g and an Intel dual core 2g is enough that I am now doing all my HDV editing on my MacBook Pro until I can afford a Mac Pro tower. I can't see that you'll be able to do much beyond simple cuts on a G4, dual or not. The render times on the PowerPC chips are very long for HDV.

You can always export the finished project back to the G4 to render in BitVice.

William,

Thanks for your reply. As I suspected really. I appreciate the help.

Andrew.