How can I make my G5 the best editor it can be…

[Michael Gissing]

[David McClave] “What if money’s not an object?”

Well that’s just plain silly. If moneys not an object buy the gruntiest MacPro with buckets of RAM and big fast drives.

I recently bought a 2.9 Nehalem MacPro Octo with 16 gigs RAM, Snow & FCS3. I retired my Tiger G5 2.6dual with 4 gigs RAM. What a world of difference to performance – particularly the really slow stuff like renders and Compressor.

This is the best way to get speed. Everything else is tinkering with a Model T to race a Ferrari.

[Michael Gissing]

Forgot to mention the ATI 4870. PCIe graphics cards compared to obsolete PCIx. Big difference to FX plugins & Color.

Retire the G5 as an ftp/web/print server.

[John Pale]

I just replaced my Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 with a used “low end” Mac Pro, (2 x Dual 2.66 GHz).

It completely runs circles around my G5. There really is no comparison. And thats with a low end Mac Pro. An Octocore is monstrously faster.

I would not spend any money on souping up your G5. Its really foolish to spend any money on a computer that old. You can’t even run FCS 3 on it….or use ProRes in HD on it. Time to move on.

If you are hellbent on not following advice to move on…. about all you can do is get the fastest drive array you can, max out the RAM and get a used ATI X800 graphics card for it (discontinued). Won’t help FCP really, but will make Motion and Color run better.

[David Mcclave]

Allright you guys… I suppose you’re right… It served me well for years, I’ll relegate it to my audio studio, where it still has plenty of power.

Oddly, while I’m running the latest pre-Intel version of FCP, I AM using ProRes 422 on it, and it seems to do pretty well. I’ve had my greenest studio editor using this machine to learn on, and he’ll at least learn patience. The G5 was a monster in it’s day, no? If you know no different, it’s still pretty darned cool.

Guess I’m in the market for an Octo-Pro to go along side my Quad 2.8….’

Anyone?

-Dave

Dave McClave – CASE42 Creative Media
https://www.case42.com
“Waaaayyy Outside The Box!”
Wait… there’s a box??!?

[Will Salley]

I’ve got a pair of DP G5’s being used as coffee tables.

Even my cute little Intel Mac Mini run rings around them.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 Quadcore – 10.6.2 – QT 7.6.3 – 22 GB RAM – nvidia8800GT – SATA internal & external storage – Blackmagic Multibridge Pro – Open GL 1.5.10 – Wacom Intous2 tablet – AJA io
SONY XDCAM EX3 – Letus Elite

[Michael Sacci]

The there two things here. A working G5 is fine, if it does what you need it to do, keep using it and down worry about it. But there is no way to make it faster. Putting more money into it is what is not wise cause there is not a way to make it render or encode faster.

So keep using it but save the money for another Intel box.

[James Sullivan]

Use it as an offline machine. A dual G5 will cut DV like it was made for it. If you use a proper offline online workflow you can be cutting up a storm and conforming on your fast machine.

Start transcoding today,

James

[Jason Porthouse]

I regularly cut HDV on a dual 2.0 G5. It’s fine, responsive and snappy. As an editor, I notice little difference from this to my MacPro. When it comes to renders and exports – well, I taught the client who owns this setup to do those herself – no point me hanging around for that.

I think a lot of the time computers in edit suites are like sports cars – you can spend loads on the last nth degree of performance, but for the large percentage of the time you’re just cruisin’ with the rest of the traffic. It’s how much time you actually get to let rip that determines the speed you really need…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[David Peralta]

I use our G5s as loading machines at our place. Load DV / DVCPRO50 via AJAio, and bring those in via shared storage. on some Ive put a couple of hard drives in there and made them a file server.