[rich82fox]

HI

I am considering upgrading my camera to a high definition camcorder.

I wanted to ask people's opinion on whether my powermac g5 is powerful enough for editing HD video?

I have a dual 1.8GZ G5 with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce FX 5200 with 64MB RAM

I will be using both iMovie and Final Cut mostly

any ideas?

rich

[Big Mac]

Yes, your G5 is powerful enough to edit HD video, although I would recommend a miniDV HD camcorder for better compatibility. If you go the newer AVCHD camcorder route you won't get built-in compatibility with AVCHD on your G5 using Apple's software. There is, however, a third-party utility that converts AVCHD to friendlier formats called Voltaic HD, and it's G5 compatible. But if you go that route beware that you'll have to waste some time converting new footage from AVCHD to a QuickTime native format, and I don't know what kind of speed to expect from that software.

[mduell]

Can it be done? Sure.
Is it particularly pleasant? No. It's slow and the available software doesn't support modern standards like AVCHD.

[Big Mac]

It's not slow if you're talking about miniDV HD editing. G5s perform fine at that.