Powerbook G4 and HDV
 

I am yet to upgrade my poor old Powerbook G4 15" 1.67 2g Ram and am wondering which direction to go in. Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.
I am buying FCS2 over the next few days to edit my XHA1s video's. I want to capture in HDV. So far my powerbook has failed to capture HDV (from CaptureMagic HD, only grabs a couple of frames and then gives up), will this improve when I aquire FCS2 and use prores?

My other thought was to look at a Firestore to use with the Powerbook instead of upgrading. Does a firestore take the load off the processor so you can edit HDV on a standard computer like mine? I'm not really sure what they do. If not is there such a device to allow me to capture and edit HDV on my laptop, or is it time to bite the bullet and upgrade the computer?

Thanks in advance.

I've edited quite a lot of HDV on that same Powerbook. You will have no problem with%2

Sorry to hijack your thread, but if I were you, I would wait untill 8th of June to think of buying Final Cut Studio...
Many people expect Final Cut Studio 3 to be announced then...

Welcome to the forum, Rob.

I've previewed CaptureMagic HD and found it to be an interesting app, it should be robust enough to handle your capture needs.

Your capture problems might be a combination of your software environment needing a good tune-up (Onyx, Disk Warrior) and making sure you don't have any hardware hang-ups with drives or cables.

If you're about to purchase FCS it might be worth waiting to see what price FCS3 will land at and if there's any significant enough updates to warrant it. Most expect an announcement within a week.

Keep in mind that FCS3 will be heavy with Intel-chip requirements to use many of the soon-to-be-released features especially when the next-gen of Quicktime is introduced so you might be better off spending your money on a new MacBook Pro rather than software for now.

If you already have FCS1 in concert with CaptureMagic HD you already have what you need to edit HDV so having a newer machine with faster CPU's and a much faster front-side bus would be a night-and-day difference in your productivity.

Think about a new Mac platform first but wait and see what happens with FCS3 prices and requirements.

oops, didn't even notice that most of my reply went off into the ether.

You shouldn't have any problems capturing or editing HDV with your Powerbook. However, you need a firewire external drive, preferably NOT daisy-chained with your capture deck or the camera. If you can, get a pccard firewire adapter so your drive and your camera are on different firewire buses.

The output render will take a while and you'll soon be longing for a faster computer, but the editing and capture should be painless.

You need to keep a good bit of free space on your system drive. Once you get below about 10% free you'll get problems in Final Cut, even if your Final Cut drive has tons of space.