Just bought the powermac. I have a couple of questions concerning a few issues with the machine and FCPHD (4.5). Hope you guys can help!

1st- The "twin turbo" fans are very noisy- every time I stream trough the timeline in fcp, it just blast off! is this normal?

2- My Powermac seems like it is connected to a life support system- it has a constant bleeping sound, much like those machines you see in the urgency rooms at the hospitals. Does someone know how to fix this, or for a worst case scenario and I have to live with it, does this sound go digitally to my created content? (will it be heard in my master recordings?)

3- Editing normal DV, I tried to change a clip's speed to 700, and it needed to render (only 5 or 6 seconds), couldn't display in RT . Is this acceptable performance?

4- Haven't tried HDV, and not even FCP5- Will this boost overall performance?

The fans on my G5 dual 2.5 race up and down too, I think this is normal. The G5's run really hot.

Are you running FCP 4.5 under MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) and QuickTime 7? If so, there are a number of issues that could give you trouble. See the following:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=46030

The beeping you describe sounds like audio which needs rendering. Try the "Render All" command and see if that fixes it.

Speed changes: I've found that RT only works with speed changes within a "reasonable" range, I think between 25% to 400%. 700% will probably require a render.

I read good things about FCP generally, and it was designed to work under Tiger whereas FCP 4.5 was not.