Older version of AE/Power Mac memory

[Kevin Camp]

if it is the g4 that apple calls ‘agp graphics’ (and not just a g4 with an agp graphics slot, which is about 95% of them), it’s very similar to one that an old colleague of mine still has. it would date to around 1999, and i think the processor speeds ranged from 350-500ghz… it also came with os8.x (maybe os9), but you’ll want to get osx (probably around 10.3 or so) just to run any software since 2001.

anyway, when we had upgraded his, i think we found that 1.5mb was the max ram it could hold (so 3x512mb sticks despite having 4 slots available)… and i think it did come with pc100 ram, but the pc133 may work, it would just come down to it the ram module fits in the slot, and i seem to remember that they were for the same slot configuration. the 100 and 133 just relate to the speed, the faster ram won’t hurt, but it won’t help either…

as far as version of ae… i don’t think i’d go below 5.5, i think that’s when the cc effects were bundled with the pro version, and i remember it had decent 3d at that point. also, you’ll want the pro version to get 3d, cc effects, and a few other things that are standard now. i think you’d be able to run up to ae7 fairly well… we had to run a g4 (dual 1ghz mirrored drive door from 2003) with cs3 for a while when one of our other systems went down… and it handled it quite well. so i think ae7 may run nicely on one of the first g4’s…

as far as ‘legal’.. adobe would want you and the other party to use the transfer of license form (search for it on adobe) to transfer that version to you… the issue you may find, is that adobe will not want that version transfered if it was used as and upgrade to another version by the other party… so i don’t know if anyone is going to do that. however, old versions of ae didn’t have the same mandatory activation that the newer versions have (i think cs3+ for mac), it was a voluntary registration process, so i don’t think you will have any problems installing earlier versions of ae on your system.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paul Campbell]

Thanks for all of this. After diving into this machine a bit farther, I’ve learned that it also has one of those Blue Ice accelerator cards in it. My friend who passed it along to me said that back in its day, this machine was the bombdiggity. It is running OSX 10.3, and it is the model that has the AGP video slot. Crucial.com tells me that this version can do the full 2GB, so I think I’ll go ahead and order that. With that kind of memory upgrade and that accelerator card, this little guy might do a good job with AE6.5 or so. I just need to make sure it’s the Pro version, like you said.

Thanks again!

[Paul Campbell]

Kevin, I was checking out the system requirements for AE 6.5 (version 7 is just a little too much for my “new” Mac!), and I’m totally unsure about one of the items:

For the Render Engine: System requirements are the same as application system requirements.
For OpenGL support: Adobe After Effects supported OpenGL card.

The render engine part I get, but what’s this OpenGL support? Do I need it?

[Kevin Camp]

to use the ice card you’ll need 2 things… the ice’d effects that came with it (they had been the old final effects package – fec effects) and os9…. as far as i know, the drivers for the ice cards had never been updated to osx… or maybe it was the ice’d effects package hadn’t been updated…

we had a blue ice card in an old powermac 9600 in the late 90s, when we had upgraded to that mirrored door g4 we found that the blue ice card would not run under osx. media100 (at that time) had the license for the ice cards and effects package, when i contacted them they essentially said that there were no plans to upgrade them… they said that processor speeds had started to surpass the benefits of the ice’d fx render speeds. they did offer free software render versions of those effects to anybody with the ice’d fx serial numbers…

your g4 will most likely run ice’d effects (and motion blur) much faster with the blue ice card, so if this is purely for after effects and your have the ice’d fx that came with the card, you may want to run os9 rather than osx.

wikipedia had some ae version info… it sounds like ae5.5 was the first osx version, so it may also be os9 compatible, but ae5.0 and earlier would have to be os9 compatible… also, if you have the ice’d fx, you wouldn’t need the cc fx that are bundled with later versions of ae, they are largely the same fx, but work with the ice accelerator cards…

also, i believe that with os9, there is a limit to how much ram can be allocated to one app…. it was something odd like 900mb. but the extra ram could go to other applications, so i think i’d still max it out….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

with only an agp 2x slot, you may have trouble finding an adobe supported opengl card for later versions of ae. all that means is that you won’t have your ram previews accelerated using opengl through the graphics card…. opengl would speed things up for you, but it is flakey and often crashes, and many people don’t think it is worth it even if their graphics card is supported…

according to wiki, opengl support came about in version 6.0… you’d have to search adobe for recommended cards for that version to see if you might be able to find an apg card that would work in your g4….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paul Campbell]

Hmmm…I was perusing the machine a couple of nights ago, but don’t recall seeing anything at all relating to “Blue Ice fx”, etc. My friend told me that when he retired this machine, he uninstalled everything (Final Cut, etc). I’ll have to ask him if any Blue Ice software was included.

I’m not too familiar with Macs. If my OSX 10.3 doesn’t support this Blue Ice card, will the computer give me any kind of device error, like the way Windows does in Device Manager?

It’s starting to sound like this Blue Ice card might be too good to be true for this little Mac. I suppose I could just upgrade the RAM and remove the Blue Ice card, and then get started with AE. It just won’t run very fast!

[Kevin Camp]

if the card is installed, but it is not supported under osx, you won’t get an error, you just won’t be able to use it. you would probably be able to ‘see’ it in about this mac>more info panel, where you can see all the pci cards that are installed (and ram and everything else), but it may not give you much info on it.

it may sound kind of funny, but it may be worth running a nearly nine-year-old os9 to get functionality of the ice card. of course you can only get the acceleration benefits of card using the ice’d fx package that it came with (which was quite extensive)… and ae’s native motion blur.

you can have os9 and osx installed on the same mac… and you can switch which one to boot from pretty easily using the startup disk control panel, or by holding option when booting and then picking which os to use. you can have them both installed on the same disk, each on separate partitions or each on separate drives, so it is pretty flexible.

so you can get the g4 and ae, and work with it in osx. then if you want a pet project and to see how much benefit you may be able to get from the ice card, you can look into that later… but you might see if your friend has the old ice’d effects package, and possibly the original os8 or os9 that came with the g4 (apple spec mentions os8.6 was shipped).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paul Campbell]

Yeah, I asked him about the card’s software, but he told me he doesn’t recall the card needing any software. He didn’t use it for AE, maybe that’s why. He only used it for Final Cut, so perhaps in this capacity, the card was simply just an accelerator. I’ll find out soon enough! Hey, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just remove it. No biggy!

[Kevin Camp]

it may be that the card was for compression, i had done a quick google for blue ice and found that there may have been a few different configurations of the card, some for accelerated effects and some for accelerated compression via sorenson squeeze or other compression utility…

but like you said, it’s no big deal, ae and the mac will work regardless of the card… but for whatever reason, i’m a graphic designer who likes to tinker with old computer systems, and this is the kind of thing i’d spend all kinds of time on… until my wife and kids revolted….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW