Viability of older G5 system

[Mark Petereit]

Since we have an active G5 thread here, I thought I’d piggyback and ask a question:

Is it possible to use a G5 with a BlackMagic or Aja board to capture HD-SDI (720p) to Prores? I’m looking to hack together a cheap direct-to-disk acquisition solution. A couple of G5 XServes would be even better, as they would only take up a couple of rack slots.

(Yes, I know. No Intel, no Snow Leopard, no FCS3, yada yada yada. No need to reply if you’re just going to tell me it’s not the BEST idea, but go ahead and reply if you KNOW that it just can’t work. Acquisition would be the ONLY purpose for these machines.)

[Walter Soyka]

[Mark Petereit] “No need to reply if you’re just going to tell me it’s not the BEST idea, but go ahead and reply if you KNOW that it just can’t work. Acquisition would be the ONLY purpose for these machines.”

I’m probably in your first “not-the-best-idea” category, but I wanted to refer you to the link I posted earlier in this thread in case you didn’t see it before: Capture to ProRes is only supported on Quad-G5s and Intel-based Mac Pros. Other systems are unsupported and may drop frames during capture.

Does it have to be ProRes? Might DVCPRO HD be an option? Or capture uncompressed and transcode to ProRes later?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Mark Petereit]

DVCPRO HD would probably work just fine.

[Michael Gissing]

I had a dual 2.5. I never tried Prores as a capture codec but I would always use ProRes 422 as the final render for HDV docos and then play to HDCam via the Decklink card. I didn’t see any problems with ProRes with that setup.

[C david Miller]

Well, I know Walter and David are all going to bash me again, but FCP 7 is the best running version I have ever loaded on my G5 2×2.5 PPC. I use ProRes and ProResHQ for capture thru a LA AJA Box. If you want to know more, just drop me a private message at my email address.

C. David Miller
video7105@comcast.net

Comcast Network Television