dvd burner and software for mac G3?

Hi,
I have a Mac G3 (blue and white tower) running Mac OS 9.2 and FCP3.
I was wondering what my choices were for dvd burners and authoring software. I hear there is only 1 burner that works really well with FCP. Pioneer i think?
I have heard great things about iDVD but it only runs on OSX. Does DVD studio Pro work on OS 9.2? I hear it is a complicated program. Any suggestions for other simple to use DVD authoring programs?

I would like to upgrade to OSX but have heard that my blue/white G3 will have problems with it and will not utilize it properly. I have seen G4 upgrade thiings in mac mall magazines, but have heard that there is so much more to upgrade that it is not cost efficient to upgrade but rather buy a new G4 system. I am taking into consideration RAM upgrades for G4, G4 processor, and many expenses I do not know of. But if I were to sell my G3 tower I wouldn't get very much money. Maybe 1/4 what I paid for it 4 years ago.

Anyone successfully upgraded to a G4 from G3? How did you do it and what was the cost of such a big step? How has it worked out for you? I have waited this long because I am a beleiver in the old "If it ain't broke don't fix it" idea, but I feel I am already being left behind and since I do this for a career I need to be able to provide DVDs to my clients witout outsourcing.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks ahead of time from a long time (4 years) FCP user and fan. Karina

Karina,

While I realize expense is an issue, I was also faced with upgrading my G4 single 867. I have done processor upgrades a long time ago with the 8500. The system never felt as rock solid as it was prior to the upgrade. This is a hard thing to nail down, but I personally feel the best thing to do is just have a pure Apple tested machine. Compressing for a DVD will take a while and the thought of having any issue that could cause a problem would likely leave you wondering if the processor upgrade had anything to do with it. I would hate to live with that kind of uncertainty.

Hopefully someone else will have real experience with this and chime in about their success or failure with such an upgrade.

You would have other issues as you mentioned though. One would be you would not be able to use AGP video cards.

I was thinking you might be able to find some bargains out there for a used G4 since the G5 is a couple weeks away from release. A lot of people will likely be selling off their G4s to fund their upgrades and you would likely see a lot of them for sale which I would imagine would lower the cost of buying one.

Apple is selling 1.25 GHz G4s brand spanking new for $1,299 and $300 more if you BTO a 2nd CPU. That is a great price and a great speed advantage for the money. I would factor that into what ever the cost of the upgrades you are interested in. I would bet these figures are in the same ball park.

I would be very interested to hear where this all leads you. Please let us know how things work out for you.

Alex

Karina,

I have friends who had the B/W G3 and upgraded it to a 500 Mhz G4 with varying successes. I don't know of anyone who has tried to put a Pioneer DVD-R drive in the B/W system though.

The B/W system has one major downside and that is unable to use more than one IDE devicve per controller or more specifically one disk inside the box.
It would take nearly as much as a nearly new 1.25 Ghz at $1299.00 to make your system usable for FCP 4 and DVD production.

B/W boxes did not work well with Firewire devices from a firmware standpoint, not just operating system version. It has a 100 Mhz system bus which is slow, but usable and it has limited RAM capabilities.

My suggestion is that spending $1300 on a new MAC ,albiet not the G5 to come, will enable you far more than dumping the same amount into you G3 box ever will.