System Requirements for FCP5.1 with HDV and DVCPROHD

[Andrew McAllister]

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.

[William Hohauser]

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.

[Andrew McAllister]

William,

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

Andrew.