For years, I've dreamed of having a computer dedicated to video and audio editing. It's always been hard to do because the moment I get a fast new machine with lots of memory and disk space, I want to move over to using it for everything. But I'm resolved this time to "keep it pure".
I got a PowerMac dual 2.0GHz G5 (on principle, I always buy the second-fastest processor available on the thinking that the state-of-the-art is over priced for the the people who will pay anything to get the best) with 2.5GB RAM, 2x250 HDDs and a GeForce 6800 GT card. I had earlier bought a 23" Cinema HD screen which I was running off my 12" Powerbook but now it belongs to the PowerMac.
(Actually, losing the 23" screen is going to be the toughest part of "staying pure" as I'm now back to 12" for things like Leonardo and MorphGNT. I might have to share the screen - that's not cheating is it? Do they make KVMs that work with Cinema HD screens?)
I spent a good part of today doing OS updates and installing Apple's Production Suite (Final Cut Pro HD, Motion and DVD Studio Pro). The machine came with OS X 10.3.4 which didn't have support for the 6800 card so I had to put a different graphics card in, upgrade to 10.3.7 and then put the 6800 back in.
The Production Suite install went smoothly. When it came to ProTools LE 6.1, things didn't go so well.
Until now, I've been running ProTools off my Windows machine. I'd forgotten just how much of a pain it was getting ProTools to work last time. ProTools is very picky about hardware and OS. I think I finally got it to work on Windows by upgrading my HDD drivers.
Anyway, I wasn't expecting any problems with my new Mac. But lo and behold, when I started up ProTools for the first time on the Mac, I got an error message (actually it was error code 1). A quick Google result on the DigiDesign discussion board indicated that error 1 meant that ProTools didn't like the OS version.
The next major version of ProTools is due soon so I wonder if that will work. Hopefully in the meantime there is a minor release that works on OS X 10.3.7. Going to investigate now...
UPDATE (2004-12-18): Looks like upgrading to ProTools LE 6.4 did the trick.