This year, my college decided to use Macs for more video editing (most of the time we'd use Dell PCs running XP Pro and use Avid Liquid). The Canton campus has a Mac video editing lab, and they acquired a bunch of new iMacs and no longer needed their older cira-2001 PowerMac G4 QuickSilvers. So we got them for our video editing lab in the Brockton campus (this is the campus I attend because it's right in my hometown). When we arrived them, all of them had the following hardware configurations:
Single 800 MHz G4 processor
1.5 GB of RAM (they were upgraded from 512 MB over at Canton)
80 GB hard drive with roughly 50-60 GB of free space left
CD-RW tray-loading drive
NVidia graphics card with 64 MB of dedicated video memory
2 FireWire 400 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports
Apple Studio Display (the version with the LCD screen, two USB ports, retro PowerMac-style casing and DVI connection)
Apple Pro Keyboard (black keys, white trim)
Apple Pro Mouse (black with clear casing)
All of them had Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (and OS 9 in "Classic" mode). All of them also have Safari, Internet Explorer for Mac, iTunes, QuickTime and the usual OS X Panther software, and they also have iPhoto 3, iMovie 3, Photoshop CS2 and Microsoft Office 2004. A couple of them also have Final Cut Express (the original version from 2003).
I remember at one point, they had me test all the PowerMacs to see which ones had Final Cut Express on them.
This semester, we upgraded nearly all of the PowerMacs to Mac OS X Leopard. It wasn't easy; we used an external FireWire DVD drive, and we also used that hack of sorts to let Leopard run unsupported on them. But it worked. Leopard runs pretty slick on them in most cases. At first glance, the only things that appeared different among booting up were the desktop wallpaper and the dock style, until I discovered the Dashboard, and other new features.
We also plan on doing more hardware upgrades to them once we get the money. We will add second internal hard drives to them, replace the CD-RW drives with dual-layer DVD-+RW/CD-RW drives (we will get them from Pioneer, so hopefully the Macs will recognize them as SuperDrives), and upgrade the graphics cards to ones with at least 128 to 256 MB of dedicated memory. As far as software goes, we have the latest version of Final Cut Express, but I doubt it would run well on them. But we might also get the new iLife software to install on them. We also have these same kind of Macs in our audio lab now, so GarageBand could come in handy for the audio production classes. And iPhoto 3 won't run on Leopard either, so that definitely needs an upgrade. Since iMovie '08 won't install on G4s without a special hack, we will just install iMovie HD 6 for the new iMovie. And we also plan on putting Quicktime Pro on all of them as well.
Any comments/questions?
Single 800 MHz G4 processor
1.5 GB of RAM (they were upgraded from 512 MB over at Canton)
80 GB hard drive with roughly 50-60 GB of free space left
CD-RW tray-loading drive
NVidia graphics card with 64 MB of dedicated video memory
2 FireWire 400 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports
Apple Studio Display (the version with the LCD screen, two USB ports, retro PowerMac-style casing and DVI connection)
Apple Pro Keyboard (black keys, white trim)
Apple Pro Mouse (black with clear casing)
All of them had Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (and OS 9 in "Classic" mode). All of them also have Safari, Internet Explorer for Mac, iTunes, QuickTime and the usual OS X Panther software, and they also have iPhoto 3, iMovie 3, Photoshop CS2 and Microsoft Office 2004. A couple of them also have Final Cut Express (the original version from 2003).
I remember at one point, they had me test all the PowerMacs to see which ones had Final Cut Express on them.
This semester, we upgraded nearly all of the PowerMacs to Mac OS X Leopard. It wasn't easy; we used an external FireWire DVD drive, and we also used that hack of sorts to let Leopard run unsupported on them. But it worked. Leopard runs pretty slick on them in most cases. At first glance, the only things that appeared different among booting up were the desktop wallpaper and the dock style, until I discovered the Dashboard, and other new features.
We also plan on doing more hardware upgrades to them once we get the money. We will add second internal hard drives to them, replace the CD-RW drives with dual-layer DVD-+RW/CD-RW drives (we will get them from Pioneer, so hopefully the Macs will recognize them as SuperDrives), and upgrade the graphics cards to ones with at least 128 to 256 MB of dedicated memory. As far as software goes, we have the latest version of Final Cut Express, but I doubt it would run well on them. But we might also get the new iLife software to install on them. We also have these same kind of Macs in our audio lab now, so GarageBand could come in handy for the audio production classes. And iPhoto 3 won't run on Leopard either, so that definitely needs an upgrade. Since iMovie '08 won't install on G4s without a special hack, we will just install iMovie HD 6 for the new iMovie. And we also plan on putting Quicktime Pro on all of them as well.
Any comments/questions?
