MEDIA COMPOSER + very old 9600 question!?…

[Bill Stephan]

First problem: the Avid boards in the 9600 don’t work in the G4. The bus on the motherboard in the newer Macs is completely different. Second problem: Avid software requires a specific version of operating system. Forget OS-X (or even OS-9).

If this upgrade actually worked, I imagine that there would be a huge market for rebuilt Media Composer 7 systems, as they are still quite decent for off-line editing large projects. But I’ve never heard of one being upgraded in this way.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Jon Zanone]

The best way to improve the speed of your system:

1) Drop it from a height to acheive maximum velocity.

2) Sell it on ebay for as much as you can make from it and invest in a new NLE of your choice.

Bill is right – you are stuck where you are. If you are really insistent on finding out more, poke around Avid’s website to see what was next in the upgrade path. If I remember correctly, the next upgrade to 8 gave us the Meridian (I may be wrong) boardset – in which case you have a dead end machine….

Jon

“The Almighty tells me He can get me out of this mess. But He’s pretty sure you’re F%$#*D!”

[Jimmy Brunger]

I feared this might be the case! I know it’s a woefully old system, but my boss is umm’ing and ahh’ing about what to do HD-wise and we’ll probs either go the FCP route on a MacPro or Avid Symphony/Adrenaline on a fast Opteron/Xeon PC.

In the meantime I just wanted to offer a short-term fix for what is an embarassingly slow system that we mainly use for offline (still fairly competent for that) but if you key a still graphic over it for 3 seconds and it then takes 3 minutes to render!?! I noticed there are several versions of the G4 (PCI & AGP) and they run 8.6, but wasn’t sure on the compatibility of the internal AVID boards..

What takes most of the load when rendering BTW….the mac processor or some kind of internal avid-based proc?
Would a top-end G3 make any difference?

Thanks for your help guys.

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[Jon Zanone]

On the Avid side, the DNA processor (either the Adrenaline or Mojo box) are designed to speed up everything. If you do buy an Avid, MAKE SURE you buy from a reseller. It will cost a little more up front, but if you factor in the amount of time (and money) you save in the long run fixing problems, you’ll see huge savings.

As for the G3 – I don’t follow. Are you asking if the G3 can handle the your old system? If you are, the answer is no. G3’s actually shipped with the first Meridian systems.

Jon

“The Almighty tells me He can get me out of this mess. But He’s pretty sure you’re F%$#*D!”

[Jimmy Brunger]

OK, so the Avid board inside the mac processes most of the rendering, not the mac’s CPU?

As for the G3 – I did a search on here and saw someone selling Media Composer 7.2 on a G3…I’m not 100% sure which 7.? version we’ve got, but is it likely this other one I saw runs on the Meridian board then?

So yeah if it’s poss, I guess I’m just wondering if we could put the Avid board/software into a G3 tower and run it off that instead? Even a 450mhz proc and more RAM in the mac should speed things up a bit no? Or have I got it wrong?

Cheers, Jim.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

OK, so the Avid board inside the mac processes most of the rendering, not the mac’s CPU?

As for the G3 – I did a search on here and saw someone selling Media Composer 7.2 on a G3…I’m not 100% sure which 7.? version we’ve got, but is it likely this other one I saw runs on the Meridian board then?

So yeah if it’s poss, I guess I’m just wondering if we could put the Avid board/software into a G3 tower and run it off that instead? Even a 450mhz proc and more RAM in the mac should speed things up a bit no? Or have I got it wrong?

Cheers, Jim.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Sorry..thought it had crashed – so posted again.

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[Dave Schweitzer]

Years ago, I successfully upgraded several MC 7.2’s with Sonnet’s G3 500 proc card – PPCG3-500-1M.
The card, which is still available, really made things snappier – moving around the timeline, waveform redraws, import/exports. Renders were not much faster, though. I vaguely remember the 9600s will take more than a gig of RAM, but the 7.2’s ran fine with 384MB.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks for the info – will look into the sonnet card.

Sorry to keep on chaps, but just to get it clear in my head could someone please confirm or deny the following: –

– Will MC7 work with a Blue & White G3 tower instead of our 9600?

– Is rendering in MC7 handled by the Mac PPC chip, or by a chip in the Avid board, or both?

– What effect would more RAM have on the app’s speed/rendering of effects?

– Could we upgrade the board to Meridian so we could run MC7 on a G4 running OS 8.6….or would we have to upgrade to a new software aswell (I think Avid Express is the next along the line?)

Thanks all, really helpful stuff here. I know it would make sense to just upgrade to an upto date system, but the money’s not there currently to do so. Therefore we need an transitional speed solution until we can dump MC altogether!

Last question -I promise- Could for instance my system (details in my sig), running Premiere Pro do the job that our slow MC7 system could just as well? Obviously there’s no hardware acceleration there, but do modern PCs running just the software and an I/O card compare to something like a h/ware based AVID of old? I mean – rendering on 3 seconds of a still graphic certainly doesn’t take 3 mins on my system!

Thanks guys.

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