SYSTEM SPECS:
Apple G4 PowerMac 867 Mhz, "Quicksilver" model
1.5 GB RAM
80 GB Hard Drive
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX (64 MB)
Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Final Cut Express 2

PREPARING THE CLIPS
For my first video project ("Mad World") I was using HD source clips in the H.264 MOV format.

If I had a faster Mac (and version 3 or above of Final Cut Express) I'd convert these H.264 MOV files to HD MOV with Apple Intermediate Codec. But Final Cut Express 2 (and my 867 MHz PowerMac) cannot handle HD, so I had to "scale down" the clips to DV MOV, which Final Cut Express 2 does support.

I followed the technique outlined on this page (HD MOV to DV) to make my DV MOV files. (If I was using a DVD rip, I'd follow this tutorial to make clips.)

Because the source footage is originally HD, the DV MOV files are a little higher quality than clips derived from a DVD. But the footage is no longer HD (when you size down from HD, you lose detail that you'll never get back, sadly).

SAVING DISK SPACE
The show I was vidding for ("Strike Back") had about 4.5 hours of footage originally. But I didn't have enough disk space for that, so I trimmed some segments to just the bits I needed. If I had wanted to, I could have connected a Firewire external hard drive to one of the PowerMac's Firewire 400 ports and stored more video clips there. For DV MOV, it's typical to need about 1 GB per 5 minutes of footage.

EDITING WITH FINAL CUT EXPRESS 2
I chose to use Final Cut Express 2 because (when you can find it) it's super cheap to purchase on eBay or elsewhere. It'll work on Intel Macs (but not with Snow Leopard). (Some Macs will give a graphics card error during startup; if that happens, press the "esc" key and Final Cut Express 2 should load normally.)

Final Cut Express 2 has a lot of features and access to sophisticated effects. The video I made was simply edited, but had I chosen to, I could have used many more filter effects, including garbage matte (what Sony Vegas users call "cookie cutter," except that a real garbage matte can be any shape). To learn more about the effects possible with Final Cut Express, visit this page (for Final Cut Express 3). Final Cut Express 2 does lack a few enhancements present in version 3, but many of the nice goodies that you'll enjoy using are available in FCE 2.

SPEED OF EDITING ON AN OLD MAC
It isn't that bad. Scrolling through footage was very smooth—that's because I was using DV MOV, which is a less compressed format, and well-suited for editing (even on old hardware). If I tried to import unsuitable footage like XviD or DivX AVI, for example, I'd have to render each clip as I put it in the timeline and scrolling through my footage would be sluggish and slow. (For an explanation about why some types of MOV or AVI files are better for editing, read this page.)


However, I could feel the slower speed of this Mac when I was adding the watermark (on a new video track overlaying the rest of the video)! That required a bit of patience. About 30 minutes for it to render on a 2-minute video! But in all fairness, that was the only time where I really felt the wait while in Final Cut Express.

NOTES ON PREPARING THE FINISHED VIDEO FOR YOUTUBE
When I had finished editing my video, I chose the simple export option: File >> Export >> Quicktime Movie...


Then I opened this Quicktime Movie in MPEG Streamclip, to then convert it to a "web friendly" format.

Ordinarily I like to make MP4 files with H.264 compression for downloads and also for YouTube. But H.264 compression requires a "newer" computer (perhaps 1.25 GHz or better) and I'm only on an 867 MHz machine. Sure, I could still make H.264, but it would probably take overnight to do it—agonizingly slow.

So I opted to use MPEG-4 compression. MPEG-4 compression is compatible with MP4, MOV, and AVI. It's not as advanced as H.264, but it'll play smoothly on old computers, and more important, it'll encode a lot quicker. For the HD-sized version of the video (for YouTube) I raised the data rate to 7600, to make sure that the quality would not suffer. I decided that the quality held up fairly well, at least for this slow-paced video.

Here are the settings I used in MPEG Streamclip for the HD-sized video: