Upgrade to iMac?

V

VR_Productions

Active member
I have a G5 Quad tower 2.5 Ghz processor and 4GBs ram. About 2.5 years old.

Would the new iMac, 2.8Ghz Core Intel be faster than what I am using now with Final Cut?

I am thinking about upgrading because the new iMac is cheap, pretty, and I am hoping faster than the tower I have now.

How many streams of HVX footage do you think the new iMac could handle without too much extra rendering?

The only downside to the iMac to me seems that I will no longer be able to connect by e-sata RAID because there are no sata cards for the iMac and I would have to use firewire drives again......

Any thoughts are appreciated.
 
It is. Because Final Cut isn't running native on a G5. The glossy screen is a little bit bad, but I will also buy one. Also 2.8 Ghz dual core with 8800 512mb grafics card option and 4gb ram (macsales.com).
 
Seems that I'm wrong informed then. However, it runs faster, more and more applications won't support power macs and RED CINE doesn't run on a G5 if you're thinking of getting a scarlet.
 
Beware guys... I bought a new iMac a few months ago as part of my editing suite and have major issues... Because the firewire ports share one bus I can't capture footage from the deck while the external terabite hard drive is plugged in to the other firewire port. Can't add another firewire port, or so I've been told. I've consulted many people about this and have not solved the problem, other than to disconnect the external drive and capture to the internal drive then reconnect the external drive and drag & drop the files to the external drive. It's been nothing but a pain in the ass.

It's faster than my older G5 and performs the actual editing perfectly but the hassle with the firewire ports has me ready to go back to the G5.

Hope you guys have better luck than me.

Steve




Veej said:
I have a G5 Quad tower 2.5 Ghz processor and 4GBs ram. About 2.5 years old.

Would the new iMac, 2.8Ghz Core Intel be faster than what I am using now with Final Cut?

I am thinking about upgrading because the new iMac is cheap, pretty, and I am hoping faster than the tower I have now.

How many streams of HVX footage do you think the new iMac could handle without too much extra rendering?

The only downside to the iMac to me seems that I will no longer be able to connect by e-sata RAID because there are no sata cards for the iMac and I would have to use firewire drives again......

Any thoughts are appreciated.
Click to expand...
 
Steve...just so you know, ALL macs only have one firewire bus. Even G5s. The advantage with the G5 and MacPro is that you can add firewire cards to get a second bus.
 
Thanks Shane, knew about the bus situation on the G5, have an extra bus on it so it worked fine when I was using it for editing... Unfortunately I wasn't thinking about the upgradeability of the iMac when I purchased it.

Steve

Shane Ross said:
Steve...just so you know, ALL macs only have one firewire bus. Even G5s. The advantage with the G5 and MacPro is that you can add firewire cards to get a second bus.
Click to expand...
 
The fact of the matter with the iMacs are they other then the Hard Drive and Ram, unless you order it with a better video card or larger display, you can't really upgrade them. Its not like your typical PC Tower, there are no extra slots or places for another firewire card.

Have you tried daisy chaining the camera through the drive to the computer? I am not sure if this might make it work, but thats how I usually capture at it seems to work fine.
 
Well, I didn't mean to highjack this thread but since I've got you guys reading here I'll share my problem as I was about to post it in the FCP forum and since I've tried for 2 or 3 months to make this silly thing do what I need it to do. I had previously been using an older G5 tower but needed to upgrade to a faster system and didn't want to have a big tower sitting around any more. I purchased my iMac last November, a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM with a 320 gig internal drive, along with a ViewSonic monitor and a new version of Final Cut Express. I'm shooting on a DVX100A and it's mostly small doc's and some corporate work. All was good with the capturing as long as I had only the internal system drive but when I decided that I needed some extra space to keep footage on that's when the problems started. I purchased a WD My Book Studio Edition 1 terabite 400 & 800 firewire external HD to use as my scratch disk. Problem is because the iMac has two firewire ports that share the same bus I can't have the camera connected and the external drive connected at the same time. Ok, so I'll just unplug the external drive, switch the scratch disk to the internal and capture to the internal, then disconnect the capture device, remount the external HD and move the footage to the external... Make sense ??? I thought so even though it's a pain in the ass.. Now the problem is this... Because I shoot the footage over a long period of time I capture as I go and I can't figure out how to get captured footage from one folder to another. Once the captured footage has been moved from the internal to the external drive I can't seem to get newly captured footage into the folder containing all the previously captured footage. I have 7 hours of footage that I captured a few weeks ago in a folder on the external drive but when I captured another 2 hours of footage to the internal drive FCE places it in a new project folder. I need it in the same folder with the previous footage but don't know FCE well enough to get that accomplished.. What I'd really like to do is be able to capture my footage and have it go directly to the scratch disk on the external drive. Unfortunately I've been told that this isn't possible with the type of external drive I currently have so I'm looking at purchasing another external drive (300-500gig G-Tech ?) that I can connect to the firewire 800 port on the computer and then connect the capture device to the new external drive for capturing and daisy chain the WD terabite in there for long term storage. I just need to figure out some way to get all my captured footage in the same folder and keep it on a larger external drive so that I can access it when needed for editing. Whew, sorry for the long story... I've spent hours researching, reading FCE manuals and searching the DVXuser site for some sort of answer. Anyone ????

Thanks,

Steve

EDIT-XTREEM said:
The fact of the matter with the iMacs are they other then the Hard Drive and Ram, unless you order it with a better video card or larger display, you can't really upgrade them. Its not like your typical PC Tower, there are no extra slots or places for another firewire card.

Have you tried daisy chaining the camera through the drive to the computer? I am not sure if this might make it work, but thats how I usually capture at it seems to work fine.
Click to expand...
 
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