Finalcut & firewire camera on Apple PowerBook G4 (2003-4), anyone? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: legacy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2019, 08:55:56 pm
content: did anyone have any experence with Finalcut on old Apple PowerBook G4?I got a maxedout one, brand new, never used, and it comes with MacOSX 10.4 ... so it's interesting for Gentoo/ppc32be(1) , but I'd also like to know how good/bad was the video-editing on such a machine during the 2000s.If someone had any experinece, please report- which version of MacOSX (10.3? 10.4? 10.5))- which version of Finalcut (PPC, pre universal binary)- which firewire/usb camera was usedthanks(1) which we at DTB actually support. But we are using a PowerMac MDD dual 7450@1.2Ghz

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2019, 09:17:55 pm
content: Quote from: legacy on March 19, 2019, 08:55:56 pmIt was painful, it used DV over firewire, the files were huge because the sound wasn't compressed and the image although of low res wasn't compressed very much or very cleverly either. 25 MB/s was typical. At standard res 4:3 a 50 minutes video would be about 75 GB, the same nowadays in h264 is barely 400 MB perhaps. Most of the work was done by the CPU, FCP back then didn't use the GPU very much or at all for rendering effects. I would not want to go back to that ever again...

author: LapTop006
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 20, 2019, 11:49:55 am
content: I did a bunch in 01-02 on various G3 & G4 machines with FCP 1.2 on MacOS 9.I don't recall it being all that painful, ingest was annoying sure, but it worked well enough.Luckily we were usually outputting back to tape so got the benefit of real-time output, instead of much slower compression

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 03:53:14 am
content: Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on March 19, 2019, 09:17:55 pm25Mb/sec wasn’t “typical”, it’s literally the fixed data rate of the DV format. (And that’s megabits, not megabytes!) And then another 1.5Mb/sec for the audio. So around 12GB/h.I supported a few clients using this type of config, and it worked quite well. I’d hardly call it painful, though it’s definitely a much slower workflow than we have with modern FCPX.Effects rendering was indeed mostly CPU-based, but nonetheless FCP tended to stay snappy during use.As already mentioned, FCP was typically used with DV format video, which in the consumer world came almost entirely from miniDV camcorders, plus a few Digital 8 camcorders, or from an analog-to-DV capture device. In all those cases, the physical link was FireWire (often called i.Link on camcorders, or 1394). It also supported various pro capture cards, but those are of course irrelevant to a PowerBook. USB camcorders were not a thing at that point in time — even if they had USB, it wasn’t for video transfer, since USB 1.1 maxed out at 12Mb/sec (raw, not payload!) and didn’t support isochronous transfers for glitch-free capture, so USB was just for still images.

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 09:20:41 am
content: Well, yes, maybe not 25MB/s, but DV files themselves were huge, and the internal lossless codec files FCP created to work with, insanely huge.Video file size calculator:https://www.digitalrebellion.com/webapps/videocalcDVCPRO made things even worse.Edit: maybe the insanely huge files lossless codec was Apple Animation?

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 09:55:28 am
content: There were a few formats for render files. The actual raw media files, when working on DV, were DV format. But fundamentally they could be anything QuickTime supported.DVCPRO is the same 25Mb/sec. DVCPRO and DVCAM fundamentally used the DV codec, just with more robust recording and with real time code. But higher bitrate versions of those did come along later.

author: legacy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 10:25:32 am
content: it seems I can use FinalCut v5 on my PowerBook-G4, which has 2Gbyte of ram and 120Gbyte of disk space.Can anyone suggest a decent firewire camera? I am not willing to do any HD video, but rhater something that can be acceptable by Youtube.

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 10:29:52 am
content: I have taken just now an 87 MB .mp4 video, it's 23 minutes, H264, 640*480 30 fps, AAC stereo and converted it to DV: 5.05 GB. LOL.

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 10:42:27 am
content: Quote from: legacy on March 21, 2019, 10:25:32 amDon't waste your time (or a single $) with that. That's my friendly advice. Don't do it. We're in 2019. A G4 is a snail. And DV... see my previous message. Both are beyond obsolete.

author: legacy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 10:56:06 am
content: my primary laptop is an IBM/X61S loaded with Windows XP. I bought it for my job, and I need Xp for a couple of programs that I am required to run. Here I only have UNIX workstations, like PA-RISC, Power9 and MIPS4/32, so ... the only professional laptop able to run finalcut in a decent way is the PowerBook G4.It seems I have to invest more money for the project

author: LapTop006
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 12:17:55 pm
content: Quote from: legacy on March 21, 2019, 10:25:32 amIf you *really* want to, Canon XL1 / XL1s / XL2.Even today, roughly 20 years later, they cost as much as a decent modern camera, and they're only "prosumer" models.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 01:57:04 pm
content: Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on March 21, 2019, 10:29:52 amWell duh, h.264 is a highly compressed distribution format, not an editing format. (Sure, it can be done, but it's not optimized for it.) DV, aside from being over a decade older, was designed specifically for tape (i.e. the codec format and the tape format are designed for each other) and editing, so purely intraframe compression, etc.Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on March 21, 2019, 10:42:27 amI concur. There's no sense in investing in a legacy editing station, other than as a thought exercise.

author: legacy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 03:18:13 pm
content: Is there anyGOODopensource software so I can acquire the video by a camera, and do video-editing on a workstation?I have a C8000, that's very powerfull: 4 PA-Cores @ 1.1Ghz, 32Gbyte of ram, and the storage subsystem uses a U160SCSI link to a ramdrive, performing 150Mbyte/sec read/write, with a maximal storage capacity of 16Gbyte.Unfortunately this machine cannot use any GFX.It runs Linux 4.16.4, and it's stable enoght for daily usage, in fact it's the machine I use for HDL simulations.