--- You wrote: question a can this g3 266 be used for vedo editng. Bruce wrote:__________ Not as it stands right now. You could but it'd be tedious, an excercise in what I call tai-chi computing. You have to move slowly and deliberately...
You can use iMovie (iMovie and a consumer-grade camera have been used to create Sundance Festival winners) if you pump memory, drive space, that G4 upgrade and a Firewire card into it, but if you're looking at pro-level video editing, you'll want a more serious system. --- end of quote --- As usual, Bruce is right. But the Beige is more capable than you might imagine. Add a G4 processor (I have a relatively slow 466mhz) and you can use Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro, especially the older versions. (You can hack the current version of Express to work on a Beige quite easily.) Older versions of Final Cut will even run in os9 with a G3, no problem. And it is amazingly capable. You can use old versions of Adobe After Effects too. This is absolutly top end professional stuff. The only problem with slower computers in video editing is waiting for effects like fades and composits and color correcting etc to render. Speed is nice but it isn't required. You can let the machine render a complex movie over night. The actual editing process does not require a fast machine. The Final Cut special effects preview functions require a minimum of 500mhz, which isn't hard to get on a Beige. If you want to do video on your machine, here's what you'll need. Get a firewire/ usb combination board, two in one to preserve a pci slot. Get a good video card like a Radeon 7000, necessary to display video as you edit. Now you've added maybe $150. Get a processor upgrade, 500 mhx or more, another $200 to $400 but I'd stay on the cheap side.. Max out the memory...if i recall you already have 550 megs or so. OWC is selling pc133 memory for about $40 right now which what you need at a pretty good price (assuming you have one memory slot still open.) You'll need lots of storage. Pick up a 120 gigabite ATA drive, 720 rpm and hang it on your ATA66 card. I think the card will be fast enough to match what the computer bus will handle. (Someone may correct me. I have an ATA 133 card which is more than the computer needs, but 7200 rpm drives on that card are fast enough for video with no dropped frames.) Anyway, the drive will cost maybe $100. You can use up to four of them as your needs grow. If you need a different ATA/pci card, another $50. Add three more drives and you have the computer I use for video and the limits are WAY beyond what I need. You can get absolutely professional results if your camera (and camera work) is good enough. The Beige machines are relatively slow, have bus timing limitations and limits in processor speeds. They also have limitations in graphic capabilities compared to the newer AGP machines. (ATI has a new board for PCI with 128 megs of memory instead of the older limit of 32 megs. Very tempting but still not AGP level.) An advantage of the Beige is that once you add usb and firewire, you have every input possibily imaginable. Scsi, adb, and serial. For those of us with older peripherals, that is quite handy. Folks on this list have argued correcly, I think, that if you are going to build up a machine, don't start with a Beige, since newer machines have become so inexpensive. But if your Beige is dirt cheap to begin with, or you have built it up slowly over a couple of years (the way I did) you can still do everything on it that almost ANY new Mac can do. Just slower. And some of the stuff you add, the drives in particular, can be used on any advanced Mac if you upgrade the basic platform. Hope this helps. Rich -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
