I just acquired a Mac and I'm curious how out of date it is. I know it is a dual G4 and it has three sticks of ram. I believe the ram said 256 on it so thats 768?

Will this run FCE or FCP?

Thanks,

Hi Andy,
What kind of specs does the system have for the processor, hard drive, and video card?

You can get this information from the apple menu on the top left of the screen. Click the apple and in the drop down menu you can select "About This Mac". It will present you with a simple spec window showing Processor speed and RAM. You can select the 'more info' button to get a more detailed listing of all the other info, including your video card model. Having this type of info will be helpful in determining which version of FCP or FCE you meet the minimum specs for.

As far as the G4 chip? I run FCP 4.5 on my G4 Powerbook (3 years old) on 3 gigs of RAM and runs great - though my renders are dog slow. I can also run the rest of the suite just fine on this system, including Motion, though it heavily taxes the limitations of my graphics card. My system also meets the specs for the current version of FCP (5) except for Motion2 because my graphics card doesn't the requirements.

With your desktop, you will probably have no problem running at least FCP 4.5, or very likely even the current version, although you may need to update your graphics card to run the current version of Motion 2.

Hope this helps.
-Jon

When I upgraded to FCP 5 my impression was that it actually ran faster on the same hardware, so you're probably OK there. 768MB sounds a little slim in the RAM dept, but might be adequate.

One nice thing about the G4 PowerMacs was all the internal drive bays. I believe you can actually put 4 drives in there - I have a 1.25ghz G4 with 3 internal drives.

I think you will also need MacOSX 10.4 to support FCP5, so check your version.

Hi Andy,
Hope this helps.
-Jon

Thanks, that's exactly what I needed to know. I'll report back with that info...

Well, I'm thinking its not very spiffy...

It is OS 10.4.2

Processors are dual 450Mhz G4, Memory is 640Mb(256/256/128). Video GeForce4 MX 64Mb. Its got a mongo 28Gb ATA drive!

Return to garbage heap?

a mac mini would leave it standing ...

Oh, well, the price was right... (free)

Can't beat free.

being paid to take it away would be better :D

I used to use a dual 450 to edit on...It'll be slow, but will work. Be sure to check the system requirements for any software you buy.

While it may very well work for you, just realize that it doesn't meet Apple's minimum specs for FCP:

Macintosh computer with 867MHz or faster PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5, Intel Core Duo processor, or Intel Xeon processor

Therefore if you have problems they will probably just say it isn't supported. Also, do those older G4's have an AGP slot for the graphics card? I can't remember. If not then it will refuse to install.

granted, mine was also an older version of FCP...when the dual 450 wasn't a bad machine to have ;)

buy a mac mini and use the G4 as a render node for compressor. does it have ethernet?

Looks like you have this one:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_450_dp.html