Using old machines for DV....

[Nicolas Kinnan]

Howdy,

I presently have an opportunity to pick up one of several old Power 
Macs of the 7500/7600/7300/8500/9500 variety and was thinking of the 
8500 because it resembles the Quadra 840av I always wanted but never 
had.

If I did get one of these, I am tempted by the notion of turning it 
into a second low end video cutting station via the addition of a fast 
G3 upgrade board and a firewire card.

What I'm wondering is:  Is this a good idea or a waste of time?  
Mainly, I am wondering if the 50MHz bus speed is too narrow a 
bottleneck for using Premiere 6.0 or FCP 2.0 (or even iMovie), or if 
there are other bottlenecks I should know about before embarking on 
this tinker-fest.

I was thinking of, if all went well, putting a G3 board from either 
Sonnet or Powerlogix in it, in either the 400-500MHz range or, money 
permitting, the 800MHz Powerlogix unit.  Does anybody have any 
experiences here with using a mid-nineties Power Mac with this sort of 
upgrade for DV editing?  Naturally, I would be putting in a faster, 
larger SCSI HD for the boot drive and I was thinking of getting a PCI 
ATA card for media drives.

My main goal here is the simple quest for the kick that comes with 
giving an old machine an unexpected new lease on life, but I first want 
to know if it's realistic at all.  I seem to recall seeing messages by 
people doing actual video work on modified 8500/8600s and their 
six-slot brethren, but I can't remember if they said they were having a 
pleasant time of it or not.

The overriding thing here is that I would like to keep this as cheap as 
possible and I would like it to work with my old Palm m100 that does 
not seem to like either my G4 or Jaguar.  If this happens at all, the 
8500 would be an OS9 only device.

Thanks,

Alex