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| 58-year old Risks Life Unicycling to Prove 350MHz B&W G3 Can Edit Video! | |
| Posted by: Snial on 2026-09-27 02:58:12 Hi folks, The slowest part of this project was umming and aaah-ing over @Phipli 's advice to buy a Belkin FW/USB 2.0 card. I waited a month before offering £8.00, and then getting a seller's offer of £8.50, which I thought acceptable. I haven't tried the USB 2.0 ports on it yet! I've seen a few YouTube videos of people editing DV video on a really old Mac and while I got the achievement, the Panem et Circenses side of my brain was thoroughly bored as the subject matter was the G3 or G4 itself. Clips of the Mac and them sitting in front, then clips of them editing the video we've just seen also on video, then they will have edited the clips of them editing the clips ad taedium et torporem. So, instead I thought I'd do a more useful video. Since I plan to see how long I can keep Unicycling into old age and I'm now nearly 59, I thought it was a good opportunity to make a video about that (it took me about 8 hours in total). Setup And Filming Process Filming using vintage tech isn't like doing it 20 years ago, because it's altogether more fragile. I'd gone through 2x built-in FireWire modules before getting the Belkin adapter and I was half convinced the eBay PCI card would be wrecked, because the seller shipped it in ordinary bubble-wrap instead of an antistatic bag or wrapping. Also, there's an ongoing saga with my getting my internal SATA card to work. I don't keep finding time to practice using the hot-air gun, because it'll take a bit of planning to dehydrate chips on the test PCB in the oven and then have a go, before I try it. And my B&W G3 has no battery so mostly I just boot into Open Firmware, then type multi-boot to list the boot drives (no alt key option to list them after the chime on this ROM). I only have 1 FW PSU and 1 FW drive enclosure that still seems to work. My Sony HDR-HC1 prosumer video camera is somewhat dodgy so I wouldn't risk it, leaving my older, but trusty Canon MV500 to do the job with 23 year old Li-ion batteries. It's so trusty it needs Duck tape to keep the battery attached ;-) ! And of course, the tapes are now decades old, and probably depositing iron flecks into the mechanism like confetti.And finally I have the B&W G3 under my desk which makes it a real chore to plug cables into it. None of this is what the experience would be back in 1999-2003 when these computers would have been the workhorses of the period: all the tech would have been brand-spanking new and virtually indestructible! So, the basic lesson is that even when you try and recreate a vintage experience, you don't. Onto the filming. The battery had plenty of charge, about 45 minutes. I initially set it up quite close to my car so I could do an introduction - I was impressed the built-in mic recorded my audio OK (I did it one take). Then I set up the camera half-way down the street with the sun behind me to get good lighting pointing at the car (our Zoe EV with 84K miles traveled). I was really concerned about not wanting to import too much video. Conventionally one uses about 1/10th of the video one shoots, because there are so many reshoots or excess footage at either end (e.g. due to delays) or a lot needs cutting to make it more snappy. In this case it's because I think iMovie 2.1.1 expects a 500MHz G3 and I didn't want to tax it too much: can a 224MB, 350MHz G3 even keep up with capturing video and dumping it on HD for very long? So, I thought about what I was going to do first. Happily, I managed to do a practice (non-videod) cycle to the end of the street to the cheers of a neighbour on pretty much the first time! I was gobsmacked, but it made me realise I wasn't likely to waste 30 minutes of a shoot with repeated tumbles. So I simply set the camera rolling and did my first filmed run, which only took 2 prior, unscheduled dismounts! Then I pointed the camera back at the rest of the street and videod another run, which again was good at the second or so attempt. I needed 2 shoots because the camera was in a fixed position each time. I then did a bit of a piece-to-camera epilogue. I grabbed my equally ancient Canon Ixus i digital camera from 2004. It, itself is pretty battered, but I wanted to see how challenging it would be to transfer its .AVI movies to the Mac. And that was it! Editing And Rendering I had heard bad things about iMovie 3.0.3 (slow, and crashy) so I used iMovie 2.1.1 for Mac OS X. I put the movie on a 60Gb FW drive as I was pretty sure the boot drive on the slow IDE bus wouldn't cope. I always edit in a PAL format, because it's a higher resolution than NTSC and 25fps is such a joy, because you don't have to think about dropped frames to fit in with 29.97 fps. But iMovie 2.1.1 doesn't have a preferences option for this, you have to trick it into PAL mode by plugging in a video camera already set to PAL 25fps. Bizarre! Editing was generally straight-forward. And pleasantly fast enough! It could keep up with all the video capture I did, which was maybe sections of 30s to a minute each time. Shuttling the camera in capture mode via iMovie worked well. The UI was fairly cute (less formal than iMovie 3.0.3). Inserting clips between other clips was perfectly fast enough and very usable. There are 4 basic editing functions: splitting a video at the playhead using Command+T ; splitting audio from video; detaching audio from video (so you can time-shift it) and pinning it back to a different reference point. I used audio splitting so that I could fuse the two unicycle runs into a single sequence - the audio from the first run where I say I'm impressed with how well it's going, overlaps the next clip on the next run to make it look like a single run shot from two angles. I adopted my normal practice of copying clips from the gallery to the timeline rather than moving them, because iMovie before 4.0 is destructive. But I still managed to get one bit wrong, where I put a transition at the epilogue to explain how I filmed my video camera. I knew iMovie would eat into the end of the clip, but forgot to compensate and I'd lost the extra few seconds at the end. I detached audio in my introduction so I could insert the Ixus clip while I describe using old tech for the video process. This brings me onto my perennial gripe about iMovie, it goes silent when you're stepping through frame-by-frame. This makes it hard to judge the right frame for a cut-away shot, because you have to guess when the subject has finished the word you want. And iMovie 2.1.1 doesn't seem to show audio waveforms so you can't use that either. iMovie only has 1 video track, so a cut-away needs precise clipping too:
Getting the .AVI videos from the ixus to the Mac was somewhat problematic. Plugging in the camera launched iPhoto instead of mounting the SD card as a drive and iPhoto ignored the movies. So, I ended up using a separate card reader. Then I couldn't convert from .AVI to .MOV using QuickTime 7.5 (which I had to download), because I didn't have the pro licence (I did 20 years ago!). I found ffmpegX on Macintosh Garden, the Tiger version. It does work on Mac OS X 10.3 as the download's Read Me explained, but one of the converters (the MPEG one) is Intel only! I need to add a comment to Macintosh Garden about that. However, that didn't matter, because I wanted to convert to .DV (PAL, 25fps) and it could do that. Unfortunately, iMovie 2.1.1 wouldn't recognise the video format, so I briefly switched to iMovie 3.0.3 and created a .DV movie consisting of only the two converted .AVI->.DV clips, which I could then import into iMovie 2.1.1. Rendering and Transitions I had trouble with the title. I created a few seconds of black and intentionally wanted the title to overlap the first bit of the video. Instead, iMovie 2.1.1 kept shifting the clip's audio to the beginning. The solution was to detach the audio, then re-anchor it to the middle of that introduction - way after the transition finished. The easiest way to create black clips elsewhere (like the end) is to create them at the beginning and then drag them elsewhere. I didn't add many transitions or text. Mostly, it was just straight cuts - videos do tend to look cheesy if you're doing Star Wars 30's style swipes or fancy effects. Still rendering the two or three transitions I had was a reminder of how slow the G3 really is. A 5s anything would take a minute or more and sometimes I aligned the cursor with the progress stripe on the transition to prove it was making progress! Creating a final video was surprisingly easy. I first tried generating a .dv movie and that was fast, it only took about a minute or so (but it was already in the right format). I always end up using the Expert... option, because I'm never quite sure what the other options really mean. I wanted to create a version of the video that I could directly upload to YouTube, because I wanted to see how much of the workflow could be done on the G3. I found that YouTube accepts .dv PAL with 44.1kHz PCM audio. However, the .dv version was about 480MB. YouTube also accepts MPEG4 videos+44.1kHz PCM, so I got iMovie 2.1.1. That took about 30+ minutes (it could convert about 2 frames per second to MPEG4). This version was 140MB long. Ironically, I couldn't play the MPEG4 version of the movie in QuickTime, because the B&W G3 was too slow! I could step through each frame though, so I concluded it was OK and copied to a flash drive under USB 1.1. Then it was a fairly simple job of uploading to YouTube via my MacBook Air M2. The Video Itself Finally, here it is (just over 2 minutes)! Watch me Unicycle! Aren't the colours wonderfully saturated? It's like watching a Technicolor™ movie in the 1950s! It's fairly blocky too, though the MPEG4 conversion (and possibly Google's internal re-rendering) seems to have made the quality a bit better, the final video looks smoother than playback on the G3. Sometimes you can see a few glitches due to errors on the tape. Conclusion It's fun to try and film + edit a video using vintage tech, but there are a lot of gotchas. Many of them for me were due to the fragility of using old tech, some due to forgetting techniques I knew and others due to having to collect pieces of software and codecs together all in one go that I would have done over months as part of a normal learning curve. Sometimes I miss the 'simplicity' of early iMovie and the joys of ffmpegX! If you have a go yourself, start with a short video, and make it a useful one, one you wanted to do anyway, because you'll end up doing it at some point so you might as well combine the two. Oddly enough, this kind of workflow is ideal for the common piece-to-camera podcast style videos we get a lot of these days - complete with jumps as the narrator got their lines wrong! Have fun, I did; survived and without a trip to A&E, bonus! This means I've kinda achieved one B&W G3 goal! | |
| Posted by: Jacques on 2026-09-27 03:35:19 Excellent write up and very glad to see you stayed out of A&E! With the old gear it’s not really the process that’s the problem, it’s the age of the gear. I have to say the colour rendition on the capture is really lovely, not washed out and dead perfect like modern video. My D50 camera recently threw a hissy fit and wouldn't write to the SD card. I discovered my original 1Gb card had finally failed, after 20years. Keep up the uni cycling, it’s good for the brain cells 🙂 | |
| Posted by: Byrd on 2026-09-27 03:52:35 Such a good write up, Julz - the added trepidation of doing this on a suburban road gave it extra excitement! If you can unicycle at 59 that is excellent balance. Video looks classy | |
| Posted by: adespoton on 2026-09-27 11:57:47 Neat! Well done, and thanks for sharing! If you want to try another piece of period tech, I can recommend BTV Edit for actually importing the video; I always found iMovie to create too much overhead, and BTV happily streams straight to disk. Also, when the tapes and/or batteries finally fail… I know my Sony Digital8 had a lovely pass through mode; I often had it set up with power cable and no tape and just recorded straight to disk through BTV Edit. 1 hour of DV stream was 13GB IIRC. | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-09-27 14:07:25Excellent write up and very glad to see you stayed out of A&E!It always looks like someone will have a nasty accident if they come off their unicycle, but in practice they just tend to scoot in front or behind and you simply land on your feet. And that's basically how I do a controlled stop. I let it scoot in front of me and then catch the front of the seat. With the old gear it’s not really the process that’s the problem, it’s the age of the gear.That's the bit that really came home to me! I have to say the colour rendition on the capture is really lovely, not washed out and dead perfect like modern video.Good point! It was a fantastic day though, lots of sunshine and into the 20s (ºC). Indoors the colour depth falls dramatically. My D50 camera recently threw a hissy fit and wouldn't write to the SD card.That's a Nikon digital SLR, isn't it? 1GB for a D50 😲 Even my ixus i has 2GB, I guess you'll have to splash out on a new SD 😉 ! Keep up the uni cycling, it’s good for the brain cells 🙂It certainly gives them a workout! <snip> If you can unicycle at 59 that is excellent balance. Video looks classyThanks! I only learned in my 30s, but I did quite a bit of gymnastics when younger - I can walk on my hands too! Stay tuned for a sequel in 2027 :-D ! Neat! Well done, and thanks for sharing!Sharing is caring 🙂 ! <snip> BTV Edit for actually importing <snip>Oh right! iMovie did keep up, I didn't push it too hard, but I'll check out BTV Edit. <snip> Sony Digital8 had a lovely pass through mode <snip> 1 hour of DV stream was 13GB IIRC.13Jiggabytes?!?!!?! I normally assume 5mins of DV = 1GB, so that sounds right though. Once analogue 8mm was all the rage. I wonder if Sony knew Digital8 didn't stand much of a chance? The Limits of Under-Powered Digital Video Editing Talking about Digital8 made me think about 8mm and VHS-quality video, which I think is effectively half the resolution in both axes: about 360x288 for PAL (QCIF) and 320x240 for NTSC (QVGA). So, if you use 22kHz, 8-bit audio, then you need about 1/4 of the bandwidth. So you need a computer with 1/4 of the CPU (and everything else in proportion). A PowerPC 750 (i.e. G3) at 350MHz has a SpecInt '95 of 15.7 (SpecFP 11.6). Lo-and-behold, a PowerPC 603e at 160MHz has a SpecInt '95 of between 3.8 and 4.1 (SpecFp ≈3.2). And you'd use about 20mins of video=1GB. This makes the data rate about 0.86MB/s (for capture). Right, so this means that Performa 5400 Macs should in fact be able to do something similar at VHS resolutions. And of course, they did have AV cards - did those cards have hardware MPEG codecs? The bigger problem I think here, beyond finding a P5400 whose plastics haven't turned to dust is finding a decent video editor. Dear Claude... please create a video editor that looks and works like the 2001 iMovie 2.1.1, but edits MPEG-1 PAL video at 25 FPS, at 360x288 VHS resolutions and runs and edits video in an application size as little as 32MB under Mac OS 8.1. In particular, I want the clip gallery; splicing video clips with Command-T; splitting 8-bit 22.05kHz audio from video clips; basic transitions like dissolve, fade in & out; centred and scrolling titles. I would like to capture video on a Performa 5400, 160MHz PowerPC Macintosh using its AV card. I want to be able to export as MPEG-4 so I can upload my low-quality videos to YouTube. The whole application should be compiled for PowerPC using Metrowerks CodeWarrior 4 Gold. Do not tell @cheesestraws . Ta. | |
| Posted by: adespoton on 2026-09-27 14:19:09 FWIW, I started using BTV under Mac OS 9; I think it was compatible back to 8.6. But it was PPC only and definitely wouldn’t function under 8.1. Back under System 4-6, I believe I was using something called VideoWorks over a SCSI interface on an SE. Framerate was atrocious, but it did capture some decent stills in dithered B/W. | |
| Posted by: joshc on 2026-09-27 14:55:04 Super cool. I never did much with video back then but of course played around with iMovie on my iMac at the time. With today’s tech we’ve forgotten just how much processing power is needed for video. Maybe the next challenge could be to see what you could do with video on a Quadra or early PPC? Or on a PowerBook? | |
| Posted by: lauland1 on 2026-09-27 15:44:03 I know quite a few people, of "a certain age", that have trouble with such balance on just their two feet! | |
| Posted by: CptnCodon on 2026-09-27 18:09:31 Fun! Great project (and executed with panache). | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-09-30 02:35:37FWIW, I started using BTV under Mac OS 9; I think it was compatible back to 8.6. But it was PPC only and definitely wouldn’t function under 8.1. Back under System 4-6, I believe I was using something called VideoWorks over a SCSI interface on an SE. Framerate was atrocious, but it did capture some decent stills in dithered B/W.I did a little bit of scoping for how to do dithered B/W video capture. I assumed 4x4 dithered pixels, which would be equivalent to 16x greys, because I also assume real-time Floyd Steinberg or Atkinson dithering is too slow. A 320x240x1bpp image then reduces to 80x60x4bpp in effective bandwidth. And if we stick to 25fps, because ... I'm a PAL guy, then that's a SCSI data rate of 80*60*0.5*25=60,000 kB/s; and an SE can manage about 0.65MB/s. That's also the pixel rate we need to render, which means we have about 6.5MHz/60,000=108.3 cycles per pixels. My best code involves chunking 4 pixels together and then using a 65536*2*4=524,288 (i.e. 512kB) dithered look-up table. Then rendering 4 pixels is: ;(a0)^grey-scale video (a1)^patterns, (a2)^screen ; (a3)^indexed patternd0=temp. moveq #0,d0 ;4c move.w (a0)+,d0 ;8c. Read 4 pixels, hi word=0. lsl.l #3,d0 ;12c shift to pixel index. move.l a1,a3 ;4c adda.w d0,a3 ;8c move.w (a3)+,(a2)+ ;12c move.w (a3)+,510(a2) move.w (a3)+,1022(a2) move.w (a3)+,1534(a2) ;16c*3 I think that's 96 cycles for 4 pixels, or 24c per pixel, about 25% CPU. So, I think it should be possible to capture and edit video at that resolution. It would look like John Logie Baird mechanical TV from 1926 😉  (except 4:3, not whatever portrait mode Baird used). Offline Non-Linear Editing Although that's pretty gruesome, you could use it for offline video editing. The SCSI device would capture time codes alongside the video; then you edit it on the SE (which generates the edit list), and to generate the final render you hook up the SCSI tape control to a first Video 8 (or digital 8); the second controller output from SCSI to a second video 8 (or VHS or digital 8) and the SE would send the edit list timecodes, causing the source tape to shuttle back and forth, recording each edit clip in sequence to the second tape. This is how a lot of video editing was done in the mid to late 1990s, when computers weren't fast enough and had enough storage for full editing. I remember having a friend at the Manchester Metropolitan University in the late 1990s who did a media degree and they had a whole editing suite with banks of hard disks / Beta SP players that worked that way. It was sweaty in there! Linear Video Editing .. preceded that from the early/mid-80s to mid-1990s. I watched a few videos on this earlier this year, very insightful. Generally they used a couple of Beta SP player/recorders (players were cheaper) and a (usually Sony) Edit List Controller. Editors (i.e. people) would shuttle the source tapes manually; then set the time codes for the next clip they wanted to add on the ELC and then it would append that clip. You could split audio too, by having different time codes for audio. e.g. you copy clip1 (audio+video) from 00:00:01:00 through 00:00:03:24 to e.g. 01:23:45:00 to 01:23:47:24 then run another second of audio only; then for clip2 you copy 1s of video only, and then the ELC adds the audio. Analogue wipes were also possible with 2x source Beta SP players and RGB cables. Back To PowerMac Video: QuickMovie I wasted some time trying to figure out if something as low as a PM6100/60 could do basic CIF (which is 360x288x25 fps PAL) editing. I found a paper from 2006 which said that for a 2D, 8x8 pixel IDCT it'd need 54 multiplications, 464 additions and 6 shifts. So scaling that up to the 45x36x8x8 pixel blocks needed for CIF: 1620 blocks, * 25 fps = 2,187,000 multiplies, 18,792,000, 6 shifts, 243,000 shifts, but on a PPC601 each multiply can be 5-9 cycles. So that's 38,726,000 cycles, because there's only 1x Integer ALU. However, maybe you could have 1 pipeline that uses the IU and the other using the FPU, reducing it to perhaps half that. 19/60=0.317, 32% of CPU. However, then I realised that for PAL colour video at 4:2:0 you have 45x36 blocks for Y, but 23x18 blocks each for U' and V' which would add another 16% of CPU, taking me to 48%. And I think that's just about doable. If not, then one could edit/play in monochrome except when paused or jogging single frames. I also thought about the screen organisation. 360x288 on a 640x480 screen I think leaves (640-360-24)=256 pixels on the gallery RHS and (480-288-32-24)=136 pixels on the timeline at the bottom, about 28%, roughly the same as in this iMovie HD resized image:  (which makes sense, because the video aspect ratio is the same). Even a Performa 5200 could manage that, if you had a SCSI drive. So, I guess what let these computers down was the lack of a decent consumer-level editor. You wouldn't be able to capture and edit entirely in software. You'd have to watch the video camera's LCD output, though the Performa 5200's Valkyrie chip can insert video directly. | |
| Posted by: ClassicGuyPhilly on 2026-09-30 04:29:23 Way cool and awesome write-up! And best of all no horrific unicycle crashes! 😉 | |
| Posted by: lauland1 on 2026-09-30 07:22:43 I read your write up in my head with your voice, from the video. The Valkyrie chip can do some clever things, I'm looking into a hack using it. | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-09-30 08:39:55I read your write up in my head with your voice, from the video.Jolly good! I often end up reading documents in the accent of the author if I've heard their voice. For example, Steve Furber, or Brian Cox (astrophysicist and ex D:ream keyboardist), but it never occurred to me that it'd happen to me! Hope you don't suffer too much ;-) The Valkyrie chip can do some clever things, I'm looking into a hack using it.@noglin knows a lot about Valkyrie. I suspect @joevt and @adespoton do too! | |
| Posted by: lauland1 on 2026-09-30 11:05:54 Not at all! If anything, it makes some of your posts even more entertaining! I have some of noglin's code and have expanded it, along with the original Marathon part he based it on. I've got some interesting things brewing using the Valkyrie. | |
| Posted by: alectrona6400 on 2026-09-30 11:16:08 impressive and entertaining work! i just got a beige G3 with the personality card (was thinking of the G3 AIO, but wanted it to be easier to store and upgrade) and i wanna do some fun things with that eventually. | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-09-30 14:53:57impressive and entertaining work! i just got a beige G3 with the personality card <snip> and i wanna do some fun things with that eventually.Thanks and interesting. What’s the spec (MHz, RAM, HD)? I guess you have the Wings personality card then? On my other thread about the B&W I said I’d have a go with an early version of EditDV. It runs under Mac OS 8.6 or 9, but it’s also like a traditional video editor. I think EditDV is FireWire oriented, but perhaps it could work with your Mac? | |
Posted by: joevt on 2026-09-30 16:26:09@noglin knows a lot about Valkyrie. I suspect @joevt and @adespoton do too!I know it exists and there's a document for one of the Valkyrie versions and DingusPPC emulates one for the Power Mac 5400 and 6400. But I haven't looked at that emulation yet and I don't know if it supports all of the features. | |
| Posted by: Andrew-R on 2026-10-01 20:47:25 @Snial, this was very lovely write-up, and very Original Content 😉 I'll post link to this thread to our little mail list (cinelerra-gg, Linux/BSD Non-linear video editor, even in original version probably too heavy for 60 Mhz PPC! also really heavy on FPU usage) | |
Posted by: Snial on 2026-10-02 13:33:25@Snial, this was very lovely write-up, and very Original Content 😉Thanks, well I am “TheOriginalSnial”. I'll post link to this thread to our little mail list (cinelerra-gg, Linux/BSD Non-linear video editor, even in original version probably too heavy for 60 Mhz PPC! also really heavy on FPU usage)Oh, so there’s a list of all the versions? Frankly, it beats me how an app as seemingly simple as iMovie, that is, with so few features, could be particularly complex to write. I’m sure cinelerra-gg was more capable. I could also be somewhat wrong in my estimation of the computing power needed to edit video iMovie-style, even if it’s 360x288x25fps. On the other hand, the algorithms available have probably improved since 1994 when the PM6100/60 came out, or 2002 when iMovie 2.1.1 was released. | |
| Posted by: UnxpectedBomb on 2026-10-02 15:23:25 This is very cool. Takes some courage to be up on that unicycle! Well done! What I really want to know is, do those USB 2.0 ports work at 2.0 speeds on your B&W under OS 9.... 😉 | |
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