One ray of hope...

I started thinking about the new Pro Res and its backward compatibility and was wondering if old macs would have the ability to use. I made a movie in the prores444 codec and sent it over to my ancient powerbook g4, at first it wouldn't open, then I updated to the latest version of Quicktime and voila it opened perfectly, alpha channel intact. I then imported it into FC 6.05 and all was good. So I guess my old computers aren't totally obsolete, yet.
I also stuck my FCS3 disk into my G5 and it immediately told me I need an Intel processor to install, so that settle that.

Playback perhaps- encode no...

Noah

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And playback is also an iffy prospect. As I recall, most G5 systems lacked the CPU horsepower to play back 1080p24 ProRes 422 in real time at full resolution. The component stepped it down to quarter-res automatically. The G5 quads, I think, were sufficient to play back that format, and maybe the fastest two-bys were, but most couldn't.