Could someone please help me. I am interested in buying a imac DV to use for video editing. I plan on installing two 256mb of ram and one of the new 75 gig IBM ATA/66 7400rpm hard drives. I also plan on using Final Cut Pro. I have read that the imacDV's use ATA/33 drives running at 5400rpm, and that a ATA/66 drive running at 7400 rpm would get too hot. I find it hard to believe that a ATA/33 drive running at 5400rpm is fast enough to do video editing. Does anyone know if this is possible. Also, I have seen kits that will turn any IDE device into an external firewire drive. Could I get one of these kits and a large ATA drive and use it for video editing? Thank you very much for your help.

well, although i dont have a dv camera, i played around with iMovie on my DV/SE, and found it acceptible. i dont know about fcp, it might crawl. btw, i found the rendering times too slow. anyone got any advice about that?

dabradda

the only problem with heat has been complete theory on people's parts. Here's the deal: Apple design the new iMac line to be cooled by heat convection, so the heat from your monitor/motherboard etc, rises, pulling in cooler (hopefully) room air into the area underneath, thus cooling the internal components. The only problem is that this design was built around a 5400 rpm drive, there's not much conclusive evidence to suppor the fact that a 7200 rpm drive will produce signifigantly more heat, but it might, and this is a multi thousand dollar investment. If you're serious about doing video editing, i would suggest buying a Blue and White G3 Tower from a dealer, or save a little longer and get a lower end G4, they're better in the long run, and more suited for the tasks that you're describing. I just read today on www.macnn.com that Other World Computing is offering Built To Order Legacy macs, and i configured (out of curiosity) a UMax S900 (6 PCI slotted full-tower monster) very reasonably, for about 3500 dollars, you may want to check that out.

[Vision]

An ATA/33 drive in plenty of fast for digital video editing. When it comes to using the DV codec, it's processing power that's important. A DV stream is only something like 3.7megs/sec (something like that... I'm going from memory), which an 5400RPM ATA/33 drive will definitely accomplish.

Final Cut Pro does take a long time to render, but that's all processor based. A faster hard drive will not significantly speed up capture/playback/rendering of a DV stream.

If you convert your movie to something other than a DV stream to a more disk-intensive codec, then a faster HD would help. Again, a DV stream does not require high bandwidth. Many people use Firewire drives for DV without problem (which are 5400 RPM drives, non-DMA interface).

Of course, a 7200RPM drive is nice (I have the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40), but don't worry about it too much for purely DV.

[tooki]

So close! :-) A DV stream is 3.6MB/sec. An average ATA/33 hard drive gets from 6 to 15 MB/sec.

I agree, though, that putting a 7200 RPM drive in an iMac DV is a bad idea (because of heat; the machine has no fan), unless you first check the drive model in the iMac, go to the HD manufacturer's website and find out how much heat it produces, and then see if the 75GB drive produces more heat. If it does not, go ahead and do it, if the 75GB produces much more heat, don't do it, you could damage the machine.

Or just get a 5400RPM 75GB drive. It'll still be more than fast enough (the 12GB ATA/33 5400RPM drive that shipped in blue and white G3s could handle over 12MB/sec sustained).

tooki

[tooki]

Dabradda: the slow speed has to do with the inherent nature of video editing. Admittedly, Adobe Premiere's rendering engine is faster, but you still end up waiting forever...
Also, I assume that iMovie and FCP share the rendering engine, much the way PhotoDeluxe could do everything Photoshop does if it had the menu commands.

tooki

I have an iMac DV SE.

I took out the 13 gig HD and just replaced it with a Maxtor 40gig 7200 rpm HD.

Fits fine, works fine, I have 3 hours of DV sitting on my iMac right now.

As for heat generated, I would be interested in this as well, all I have done is stuck a digital meat thermometer at the top of the machine after the HD was on for 2 hours (room ambient temp: 70 degrees F)

The reading was 130 degrees.
When in SLEEP mode, the iMac registers 99.8 degrees after sitting overnight.

I am about to download and install GuagePro or something to test the CPU temp, which is what really counts. Does anyone else have an iMac DV SE that has GuagePro installed that could measure the temperature after a few hours of work for comparison purposes?

Otherwise, the only way to really find out would be for me to remove the new 40 gig drive when I am done with this project and then REINSTALL the old drive JUST to take temp measurements. I should have done this before I swapped drives, but I seem to notice alot more interest in this heat issue AFTER I installed the drive.

ok, i thought my brand new machine was getting slow on me. i tried avid cinema on a b/w g3, but since that's not digital, i guess it wouldn't have to render at all. am i close, or way off? also, has anyone used a tv converter to go from iMovie straight to a vcr, instead of going back to the camera and then to the vcr? i would think you wouldn't have to render then.

dabradda

[Stogieman]

Hey Jim, I just finished downloading Gauge Pro. I've been using my iMac DV SE on the internet for over 2 hours. The temp on my processor is 123� F and the room temp is 68� F. Have you had any problems with the extra heat? Hope this helps.

[sblunden]

If you are serious about using FCP I would not get an iMac for 2 reasons.

First - Monitor, 15 is not big enough for FCP, sure it will work but the experience is not worth it.
Second - Speed, a G4 will greatly decrease the render time.
I have used FCP on both an iMac DV and a Yikes G4. The G4 had a 21 inch monitor and was just about perfect use of Desktop space. I would not use anything udner 17 and preferably 19 or higher. Even at 1024x786 a 15" is jsut too small.

Also if you are serious enough to buy a $1000 piece of software then I think it is smart to save up another $1000 and get a low end G4 with a 19" monitor.



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- s p e n c e r

Stogie-

I just tested GaugePro on my setup (40 gig Maxtor 7200rpm)

3 hours of DV playback produced 130 degrees of heat AT THE TOP (like before, measured with a digital thermometer)

GaugePro said CPU read 102 degrees!

sounds fine to me.

[Feathers]

My sixpence worth:

I'd sooner buy proper firewire(not just FW connected) external drives than stick a 75gig 7200rpm into an iMac DV, heat only being the 1st consideration.

G4's have altivec and the newest version of FCP is optimised for same, much faster rendering.

In general only transitions, effects etc have to be rendered, plain cuttting stuff will play straight away.

You could use a scan converter but the quality will be beyond crap by comparison with a DV render back to tape. FCP and iMovie NEVER display the full DV stream in real time, it's either full quality OR full speed, not both. The DV stream must be uncompressed to view so the 3.5M/sec becomes 35meg per second to display, which is still huge and impractical without a native hardware codec, but time will tell.

I also agree that the 15" monitor gets a bit crowded, you would have to modify your workflow perhaps using the single(virtual)monitor display etc.