Upgrading a Beige G3 for video.

[salohcinluap]

I'm pretty excited. I get a kick out of upgrading old gear and making it useful. It helps me with Gearlust when I can't afford whatever's on the front of Apple.com. (I don't visit there very often just for that reason!)

The plan, albeit ill-informed, is to use a Beige G3 for editing video. I bought it with 256Mb RAM, Personality card, CD ROM and 4Gb HD. I swapped the HD for a 10Gb one, partitioned it in half and reinstalled 9.1. I have Jaguar on it's way, so that will be my next upgrade. Then I'm planning on using iMovie for editing.
Obviously, I'll need more RAM, so I'll keep my eye on eBay. I'm sure I could use more VRAM too.

Does anyone have any suggestions - video cards, firewire cards, things like that? Is the personality card all I need, since it has s-video in/out ?
Anyone else using G3s for video editing?

[eric2006]

One camcorder tape is about 20 GB in size, so you should get a bigger hard drive if your projects are over ~ 15 minutes. It would be much cheaper to get a blue and white powermac that has built-in firewire and probably bigger hard drive that to throw money at an old machine. Even a used G4 would be a deal - it's a LOT cheaper than buying a processor upgrade, considering you also get a graphics boost, RAM boost, and the good looks of the powermac G4 / G3.

[salohcinluap]

I see. That makes a lot of sense.

Something else to consider: Right now, I'm sharing an internet (ethernet) connection from a Powerbook G4 which also has a f/w drive attached. Is it viable to use that connection as an external drive? Where is the speed bottleneck?

[fryke]

You mean through the network? Nah, for video, you'll want the harddrive directly connected to the Mac.

[ra3ndy]

Originally Posted by salohcinluap

I see. That makes a lot of sense.

Something else to consider: Right now, I'm sharing an internet (ethernet) connection from a Powerbook G4 which also has a f/w drive attached. Is it viable to use that connection as an external drive? Where is the speed bottleneck?

It's not so much an issue of bottleneck, as it would be an issue of length of pipeline. It'd be sort of like using a 20ft garden hose to water flowers that are only 5 ft away.

You'll have more wait-time between read/write cycles than is healthy for operations that require very fast/reliable speeds.

[RacerX]

I think you'll find that the AV option in the Beige G3s is not supported by Mac OS X... so if your main point of using that system is for video editing, Mac OS X is most likely not the way to go.

I just finished putting together a Beige G3 for a client. It has a 40 GB hard drive, 640 MB of RAM, I added the AV option plus maxed out the onboard VRAM to 6 MB (which is used in video capture). We are currently looking at either a 1 GHz or 1.1 GHz G3 upgrade as the software we are using (Premiere 5.1 and VideoShop 4.0) are pre-G4 software and would get nothing from Altivec. The system works nicely right now with the original G3/300 when capturing/editing 320x240 at 29.97 fps.

People today seem to forget that systems like these were being used for video editing in the mid-90s and seem to think that only high end systems of today can do such tasks... even though tasks like these were being done long before today's technology existed.


On the other hand, I'm finishing up a Beige G3 for myself running 10.3.9, 512 MB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 7000 (32 MB VRAM), 80 GB hard drive and (hopefully by the end of the week) a G4/500 upgrade that I'll use for small video editing projects using HyperEngine AV. The 80 GB drive is connected to a ATA/66 card, the CD-ROM drive and DVD-ROM drives are on their own EIDE buses off the logic board. As I still have an open bay, I may throw in a CDRW in below the DVD-ROM.

I have a USB card in mine, but I could have dropped a USB 2.0 and/or Firewire card in it... but I got the USB card for free (as with the system... and all the parts I've put into it so far), and I haven't felt the need to spend anything on this system (beyond the processor upgrade) yet.

I have an SGI Indy that is designed for capturing video at full frame size at full frame rate, plus I just added a specialized video capture Nubus card to my 8100av (upgraded to a G3/500) that can capture at full frame size at full frame rate also (I also have Premiere 5.1 and VideoShop 4.0 along with QuickTime Pro 5 on that system). So I haven't had much need for getting my Beige G3 to capture video.


On an interesting side note... using it's original G3/266 processor, I have no problems watching DVDs in 10.3.9. It seems that the DVDPlayer software does everything via the graphics card and the main processor plays no part. QuickTime and some aspects of games don't seem to get as much help, but the system doesn't seem nearly as slow as one would think for a G3/266.

Still, it doesn't take too much to tax it to the point of realizing I need that faster processor.

[salohcinluap]

RacerX (thats a name of an 80s metal band isnt it? I think Paul Gilbert played with them)
SO do you think the Radeon would help if I'm intent on running OSX? I really don't mind OS9 - as long as I can find some video editing software. Any recommendations?

Thanks for the lengthy reply - this is just what I'm looking for - cheers!!

[RacerX]

Originally Posted by salohcinluap

RacerX (thats a name of an 80s metal band isnt it? I think Paul Gilbert played with them)

I don't know, I got it from my favorite character from the animated series from the 70s, Speed Racer

SO do you think the Radeon would help if I'm intent on running OSX? I really don't mind OS9 - as long as I can find some video editing software. Any recommendations?

For Mac OS 9 the on board video (specially if maxed out to 6 MB) is great... but for Mac OS X, pretty much any of the ATI PCI video cards (Rage 128 or higher) will end up making a pretty big difference. Mac OS X passes a lot of stuff off onto the video card. I've had pretty good luck with clients using the Rage 128 cards out of the Blue & White G3s in Beige G3s while running Mac OS X.

The finding part is always going to be the hardest part of getting video editing software for Mac OS 9. I bought Premiere 5.1 on ebay about three months ago for about $25. I've also seen Final Cut Pro 2 and 3 for semi-reasonable prices. The next thing I'll be looking for for my older systems is After Effects 4.x.

I also had a free version of VideoShop 3.0 (from an old MacAddict CD), I'll have to see if I can find it some where.