Old Mac Love—My Old Macintosh Fan Page (Fan vidding on an old Mac)

Old G4 Buying Guide for Vidding | Final Cut on an Old Mac | Final Cut Features Overview & Tutorial | Return to Elvira's Main Site

This section of the site is created to pimp Old Mac Love! If you are visiting this page because you saw the fan video "Mad World" on YouTube and you want to know more about vidding on the cheap with your old (circa 2001, 2002, etc) G4 Macintosh, read Mac Vidding On The Cheap (a good introduction tutorial), then peruse Old G4 Buying Guide, and Final Cut on an Old Mac.

For notes on the making of "Mad World" (HD fanvid edited on a $150 eBay G4 Power Mac with Final Cut Express 3.0) visit the Final Cut Tutorial for Old Macs.

So, I've started playing with my old Macs again. (I have a penchant for old hardware/software.) Among all my old Mac clutter I found a copy of Final Cut Pro 2 (not Final Cut Studio 2, Final Cut Pro 2!). This was first released in 2001, and while a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same.

Here is the G4 PowerMac that I'm currently using for my visit to RetroMacLand. A 2001 "Quicksilver" G4, maxed out with 1.5 GB of RAM (the most it'll take), three internal hard drives with over 500 GB of disk space, and a NVIDIA GeForce3 (64 MB) AGP video card. This machine can run Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) but that's as far as it'll go. It'll also run Mac OS 9.2.2, which is what I am currently booted into as I type out this page. (Am using the OS 9 version of Dreamweaver MX.) (Update January 9. 2010: That didn't last long! I decided after playing around with my lovely 2001 Quicksilver that I had to edit HD video, so I am swapping it for a 2002 Quicksilver 1 GHz Dual CPU G4. Woop woop woop!)

Oh, and here's a tangental tidbit that might be of some use to someone out there—you know those "upgrade" disks of Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) that were given to new Mac buyers when Leopard first came out (October 2007)? Well, these "upgrade" disks totally work on G4 Macs. I'm just passing along that bit of information, as I've read in other places that since these disks would only work on Intel Macs. Not so! Trust me on this one.

Final Cut Pro 2 and Mac OS 9

I so have to make a fan video in this thing! It's so familiar, yet so different. It takes only about 11 MB on the hard drive, and at first glance, everything looks very similar.


Click on thumbnail to see larger picture.

These seem to be the main settings for Final Cut Pro 2. It supports others, but you have to manually edit them. I set up a project setting with widescreen (16x9) PAL video. I made some clips in MPEG Streamclip (while booted into Mac OS X, of course) in the Photo JPEG format, 640x360 in size. And Final Cut Pro 2 accepted these clips. (It doesn't seem to recognize my DV files, even though it's got a preset for DV?)


I had to manually set this all up. But it worked!

So far, that's all I've got!

Mad with a Mac

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