A sales assistant today said there were rumours that Final Cut Pro doesn't work on the new graphite dv Mac.Is this true? And if so, what are Mac up to?

-- Bob Gannon (bgn@freeuk.com), October 21, 1999

Answers

He's only a little bit right but still giving out erroneous information.

Final Cut Pro requires 128 megs of memory by itself so if you tryed to use it with a stock iMacDV SE that has 128 megs of ram it probably wouldn't work too well. FCP needs lots of memory.

Since the iMacDV has a G3/400mhz it has enough processor power and the hard drive can spit out full DV quality with iMovie via the firewire.

Bottom line is you need at least another 64 megs(better to have 128megs more) ram in there.

Also there is a lot of stuff on the Final Cut Pro interface so adding a 17" or 19" monitor would help plus after a while you probably would want to put a bigger hard drive in. Thats still about half of what a desktop G3 or G4 FCP system would be.

Lots of people will be using the new iMacDV's with other DV editing programs. EditDV renders a lot faster than FCP and takes up a lot less ram. I believe Premiere 5.1 says its takes 64 megs. I'm still investigating Strata Videoshop and Moviemaker for use in a iMac DV

Michael C

-- Michael C (dontemailme@hotmail.com), October 25, 1999.