Upgrading question.....Have done Homework.

Hello all:

I've searched here, investigated as best I can; now I need expertise. I want to mention I am a solid novice having completed to market one commercially successful "How to video" and am presently finishing the shooting phase of my 2nd.

I want to upgrade....my G4.....(eye-yey-yey you say)...FCP3.04 to FC Studio.

Will my investigation work.........

Presently....... G4 with OS 10.2.8, 1 gig memeory, 1 GHzPower PC G4 ver=2.1
2-80 Gig internal drives, and 3 external drives daisy chained 1-120,
2-160G. This system has been very very stable.

I want to upgrade to FC Studio and use my present Adobe software: PS7, Illustrator10, After Effects 5.5 (I know there is a Motion issue here).

Will this work???:

Add ATI Radeon9600 AGP4X 256MB VRAM Video Card to deal with Motion, another Gig of memory, Upgrade OS to Tiger, and possibly add 160 Gig internal Drive to carry the applications.

Also, I know After Effects will not work seamlessly with motion without an upgrade, but will PS7, Illustrator10, and the ability to render a movie in After Effects for import into FCP run properly. Will use DVD ST Pro in studio pkg.

I'm open to suggestions if others have done this upgrade.....please don't say get a G5 etc, I have thought out my upgrade schedule and plan the next to be a new system.

Greatly appreciate your thoughts.........Thank you...........Sailho

Here's one of my systems. I did this before buying a Quad G5.

Quciksilver 2002 dual 1.0 GHz G4 with 1.5 GB RAM - ATI Radeon 9800 Mac Edition video card - 2 -250 GB SATA drives inside and 2 - 250 GB SATA drives external.

Final Cut Studio 5.1 - Tiger 4.6 - Quicktime 7.1 - Shake 4 - Photoshop CS 2 - etc.

One thing you might consider is going with the ATI Radeon 9800 256 MB VRAM AGP video card as it is better than the 9600. You could also go with a 1.8 GHz G4 CPU upgrade if you want to spend that money, however you are getting to the point, as we all say, of throwing good money after bad. A used G5 would likely have all this stuff and be more usable.

Works reasonably well until you try to render a movie or use Compressor to encode MPEG-2 and it takes hours. Run the same task on my Quad G5 and it takes tens of minutes, not hours.

im not sure that after effects and motion have any kind of "integration" to begin with... ANY version of after effects will render movies fo use in FCP...

John and Wayne........not quite but almost a classic... "howdy Pilgrim", couldn't resist.

I went ahead and ordered "the stuff" for my upgrade I asked about. I really appreciate your getting back to me. I'm still scared though......going on FCP3 in 2002 was quite a bit ..."unstabling". Hopefully that dar-gone mustard colored screen doesn't come back to haunt me.....but I kicked his/her ass once, I'm up for the upgrade challenge. Being the solid novice I am, for my work, I believe I worked this upgrade approach perfectly, I stablized FCP3, worked the hell out of it, topped out my G4 with this upgrade, will work the hell out of the FCP5 Studio, then be prepared and set to jump to HD with a whole new system........Best laid plans.

Again, thank you.........Sailho.......Neil