[johnnybmxer]

So while filming for my Video Production class in school a few eeks ago I looked to the back of a teacher's room to see 5-6 Powermac G3 sitting in a corner. I kinda just blew it off until a few days ago. I was sitting in class looking at all the hardware anf software we use. Adobe Premiere 6 and 6.5 on Gateway computers lucky to have at the most 1GB of ram. They aren't much. I remembered my teacher talking about the local news station useing Final Cut primarily and she didn't really know much about it.

I use Final Cut Studio on an iMac G5. I love it and know that it's used in many film studios and news station across the nation. It's a popular and powerful tool. This all in mind I have set out on somewhat of a mission. I'm gonna grab those G3s, update what I can on them, and see if it's possible to get an older version of Final Cut operating. I think it'd be a valuable thing to have.

So here's the help part.

I need to know if it's possible to have a stable video editing environment on a G3, what software I need, what hardware I'd need to install, and all the other things. All help would be appreciated, thanks.

[Spoffo]

I seriously doubt it's worth it.

First question: Does the G3 have Firewire? My memory is fuzzy, but most of those old G3s didn't even have USB. They just had the the old Apple Desktop Buss and SCSI. Without a firewire port, you've got no way to get video in or out of the computer.

IF you do have firewire, you probably need to update the OS to 10.3 or 10.4 (Check the Apple website to see if a G3 even runs with OS X) Next, you''ll probably need to add a lot of RAM and probably a bigger hard disk. We think of hard disks in hundreds of GB, but back in the G3 days 400 MB was considered a pretty good size, especially in a school.

If, after spending all that money, you can get Final Cut to run at all, it would probably be so unbelievably slooooooow as to be useless. As a guess, a render that takes 10 seconds on your G5 might take something like 15 minutes on a G3. (That's 2 orders of magnitude slower. It might be worse than that.)