Advice needed to help an elderly G5

Steve Strickland

Steve Strickland

Well-known member
I've got an old 1.8 G5 that I need to limp along for another few months while I get my money together for a new Mac Pro.

Cutting DV was never a problem. Now that I'm cutting XH-A1 footage, my machine is seriously choking. I just ordered some more ram to bring it up to 4.5 gigs (it was 2.5). I also am waiting for a Radeon 9600 Pro video card to arrive to finally change out the stock 64m card that I've been gettting by with for several years.

That being said, would a G-Raid2 drive show any improvement in real-time playback over the extra internal drive that I've been using? The specs say that it can handle multiple streams of HDV. With my slow single processor, would this apply?

I want to keep my old girl going for a little while longer. It seems like I'm throwing money away into my old machine. Unfortunately, my good paying gigs are a few months out.

Thanks a lot for any advice.
 
I thnk the problem is that HDV is a very computationally intense codec
for editing. After you import your footage, convert it to another codec that
doesn't use interframe compression. If you have FCP6, prores 422 would be
ideal. If not, then Apple Intermediate or DVCPRO-HD might be the ticket.

Les
 
ProRes needs Intel for playback so that's no good, also HDV to AIC conversion will take a long time. There's not much you can do here that won't cost money. It's time to retire the g5 and go intel or suffer through at slow speeds.

Noah
 
Thanks guys. I'll save my money on the G-Raid and put it in the Mac Pro pot.

I could probably afford an iMac now, but I'm going to wait for a machine that will be viable for the next few years. With the MacPro, I have more options to expand down the road.

Cheers:beer:
 
I've been editing PreRes just fine on my quad G5, so it doesn't need intel for playback. That said, I would recommend a newer Mac Pro.
 
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