[MacDV] Using old machines for DV....

[Jim Asherman]

On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 11:51  PM, Nicolas Kinnan wrote:

> 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
>

I have a 9600 with a G3 @400 running 9.1 . iMovie works great as loong as
you have a good fast drive to work it with, Other programs will work too.
I have an orangelink FW USB card, and a Radeon 7000 installed in it.
It will do a lot of stuff and if you go to a 7or800mzG4 should do more.
This setup worked in a 7600 too.
Jim