Doesn't FCP4 need 60 gigs min?

I think the most important question is if this is just video for yourself or if your going to be making it a business? For home video, sounds like you can get by with what you've got. As for me I have a 1gz Emac w/ FCP4 and it works great. (new emac about $1000) It's cheap enough that I can have it dedicated to just video and photo work. An older comp takes care of all the other busness. Would I like a G5? sure, but realistically I don't need it. And the extra rendering time forces me to go out on the porch with a cup of tea to watch the sunset.

Peace, Chris

I have Dual G4/450 with 896 MB of RAM. My system can almost do RT Extreme in FCP 4.1.1. I don't do anything terribly complex so I don't stress the system too far. I am probably going to wait another six months to a year for a new box, a dual G5. This is a hobby for me.

LiveType is kind of sluggish but it does work. I still use Graffitti for a lot of my work and it is somewhat sluggish as well.

Mike Harpe

I mentioned this in a post earlier in this thread but thought I'd mention it again.

If you want to make sure that FCP is getting the top priority of processor usage when working or rendering, you can change it through Terminal.

Go into Terminal, enter "top" (no quotes) and hit return.

This will show you a list of processes going on in your computer right now with a process number before the name. Make note of the process number for FCP.

to make FCP the number one priority just enter this:

sudo renice -20 <process number>

hit return and it will ask you for your password, enter it and you will be told that FCP now has -20 priority which despite the way it sounds is the top priority level in the system.

I usually forget to do this since you have to do it every time you launch or restart FCP.... but I was rendering something today that said it had 3 hours yet to go, I reniced it and it went down to 2 hours instantly.

I do this especially when I'm rendering overnight or something like that.

you can research the renice usage on www.macosxhints.com and other OSX sites.