Specifically for video editing: How do the 800 mhz iMac G4's handle Tiger?

Due to the district being morons (their policies include not letting us use wireless mice), the few iMac G4's in our Brodcasting class at school are REALLY behind on updates.

My teacher is working on getting it through purchasing, however our district is not very good with Macs, so I really don't want to work for god knows how long to get them to let it go through if they won't run well. All of them are running 10.0- 10.1.5, and the lack of iLife support, Safari updates, etc. is getting to be more than an inconvienience. So she's looking at getting the 5-license Tiger deal, but again, if it won't run smoothely it's kind of a waste of time.

Specs:
CPU: PowerPC G4
CPU Speed: 800 MHz
RAM: 768 mb or 1 GB
Video Card/Chipset: NVidia GeForce2 MX
VRAM: 32 MB
Hard Drive: 60 GB
Optical Drive: SuperDrive (24x/8x/4x/6x/2x/1x CD-RW/DVD-RW)

What program will you be editing with?

For iMovie, those stats seem fine, but for FinalCutExpress/Pro, those are kind of measly. Final Cut WILL run, but it will be very slow going on the rendering side of editing. I've edited using iMovie on a 333Mhz iMac G3 on OS9. Works great.

If it's just iMovie, it should be fine.

I'm kind of confused though, are the G4s running 10.0 - 10.1.5 ?
I thought the G4s came stock with 10.3…

surfwax95 said:

What program will you be editing with?

For iMovie, those stats seem fine, but for FinalCutExpress/Pro, those are kind of measly. Final Cut WILL run, but it will be very slow going on the rendering side of editing. I've edited using iMovie on a 333Mhz iMac G3 on OS9. Works great.

If it's just iMovie, it should be fine.

I'm kind of confused though, are the G4s running 10.0 - 10.1.5 ?
I thought the G4s came stock with 10.3…

Click to expand...

Yes, we pretty much only run iMovie. We have a license for Final Cut Express, but no one really uses it.

Early G4's from around the original OS X was released. It's namely because no one updates them (we're always actually doing editing work, so it's a real pain to be in the middle of working after coming up with some great idea and then re-starting and having to get back into it).

I've found that updating older macs to Tiger sped them up considerable. I have two G4 400Mhz Powermacs with Tiger, a 350 Mhz and 400Mhz Powermac G3 with Tiger. They seem around 30% faster than they did under Panther. I don't do video editing on them though...(Why would I, when I have a powerbook?)