02-05-2004, 03:34 PM

I grew up on PCs and build custom setups for my video editing work (a collective GASP from the audience ).

I have an opportunity to do some contract video editing for a client. They require that I use Final Cut Pro and hence Mac. At work I'll be using a G4 dual processor setup, but I need to be able to work at home as well. They have given me the option to buy a used Titanium PowerBook G4 for $1000. (800MHz, 40Gig, 512MB)

I have NO IDEA if this is a good deal or if it will be able to do my work away from work. :confused:
(I will be using an external 7200RPM hard drive for storage and eventually I will upgrade to 1Gig of RAM...)

Do you think this machine will run Final Cut Pro 4 effectively? How will my render times be??

Any insight is greatly appreciated!
(If anyone has experience doing video work on this machine I would LOVE to hear from you.)

Thanks for your time.

02-05-2004, 06:15 PM

I've seen a friend do basic video editing on a 500-ish MHz iBook and it was just fine... I personally am now running a 1GHz PB and from how it handles other applications, video editing will be a cakewalk. I'd expecting rendering on an 800MHz G4 to be a similar speed to rendering on a 1.6-ish GHz PC.

As for pricing, that seems like a pretty decent price to me, but (as you should be in the habit of always doing) check eBay to see what kind of prices you can get there. The machine you described seems like a good deal to me, though.

Oh a side note, Titanium Powerbooks have USB 1.1 and Firewire, so be sure you get either a Firewire external HD, or a USB 2.0 PC Card for the HD. Also, Mac OS has read-only access for any NTFS formatted drive, so if you're using a formerly Windows XP external drive, you may have to reformat it to FAT32 or HFS+.