Composing gig on an older PT system? Possible?

[bropecia]

Hi all,

I have an old system, HD Accel, two 192's, Control 24 , Pro tools 6.7 running on a Power Mac G5 tower. I also run an older version of Reason (4.0) slaved. I know, cue sad violins... But it works for me.

It's looking fairly certain that I will have a composing gig for a lower budget cable TV series coming up around September/October of this year.

I am comfortable with this system, and would like to use it for this gig... I'd rather not introduce the variables that come with buggy upgrades and unfamiliar interfaces etc by upgrading (I know I'll have a panic attack if I do that), but most importantly I do not have the financial means to do any kind of upgrade before I start this job.

My question: are there any composers out there working presently with a similar system who are able to interface successfully with their state of the art post departments? Or just anyone who knows if this is feasible? First thing that comes to mind for me will be the ingest of Quicktime video on my end and my older version of QT (limited by power mac 10.4.11) not being able to play the new goods (in which case I would make a conversion with mpeg streamclip or something). But I'm sure there are many other considerations.

Any input/guidance links to resources appreciated. thanks.

[philper]

As the composer of the series it seems like you should get to spec the elements sent to you? So tell them what works for you as a video file. If they can't or won't do what you want there are various video file conversion paths available that you can do yourself. You know your music comp work works on your old system, what are they asking you for for your deliverables? Files and stems are no issue of course. If they want PT sessions you could do a quick test with them to see if they can open your PT6 projects--if that project is simple, maybe just wav stems w/o plugins etc it will probably work.

[reichman]

If I remember correctly, Pro Tools 6 can run the 23.976 frame rate. You should be good to go. Don't cue any sad violins. A lot of major work is done on surprisingly old systems.

[bropecia]

Great, thanks guys. Appreciate the feedback.

[MatzeHD]

If you good in your system, then is no problem and IMO the old TDM Systems has a special "Soundlook" through the fixed point DSPs! :)
For video preview, you can downconvert every HD/UHD video and play it may be with DV Codec or whatever G5 Mac used in this time.