I may be wrong but I think the FCP3 item in this month's magazine has got the wrong end of the stick! As I understand it, FCP3 offers TWO new realtime preview modes:
1) An offline mode using reduced quality MJPEG proxy files
2) An online mode using the real DV files.
It is the latter mode that has the strict hardware restrictions to work (500MHz or DP G4)
Perry Mitchell
Yes an no,
It does have the two modes but only Offline RT give you the full feature set of transitions in RT (that is on a monitor in lower res with no monitor out support)
The DV mode only have a few of the RT transitions (cross fade, fade to black I think - but don't quote me) and this is dependent on a fairly high G4 processor or dual
BUT - I should point out and apologise for an error in the Boot Camp - Online Marketing article...
I stated that Cleaner 5 EZ came bundled with FCP 2.0, when obviously it doesn't, but rather a direct 'save as QuickTime' feature.
Very sorry about this, I am sure Bob will find me a suitable punishment, perhaps testing Alpha versions of Videowave for a year 
[This message has been edited by Benfrain (edited 11 January 2002).]
Well according to the Apple site, the following are available in BOTH offline AND DV:
Real-time transitions and filters
— Cross Dissolve
— Iris transitions:
Diamond Iris
Oval Iris
Point Iris
Rectangle Iris
Star Iris
— Wipe transitions:
Center Wipe
Clock Wipe
Edge Wipe
Inset Wipe
V Wipe
— Color Corrector 3-way filter
Real-time motion effects
— Opacity
— Scale
— Center
— Offset
— Crop
— Aspect
The improvements are due to optimised use of the Altivec processor (hence G4 only) and also dual processor when available.
Personally speaking, I only need the dissolves and colour corrector in real time. Not sure if I'll wait for my upgrade to OSX before I go to FCP3.
Yes, the point is though that you will get less in RT DV than you will in the Offline RT mode because Offline RT is lower bandwidth. If you have got a ninja set-up (dual 800, 1.5Gb Mem) you will get them all in DV too.
Plus, someone posted an interesting trick on the x8elrate your mac site that lets you cheat FCP3 into thinking you have a higher spec set-up! You may be able to get a lot more from your set-up...
Perry, are you saying you haven't moved to OSX yet? If not you should give it a whirl, I hate booting back into 9.X now I'm used to it, and now FCP is here there will be very little reason to soon!
Re: OSX
I'm looking forward to it, but I decided some time ago that until:
Photoshop
Illustrator
After Effects
FCP
QuickTime
Digital Voodoo
were all native then I'd wait. Looks fairly close but I'm not holding my breath!
I'm really struggling at the moment to get my two video boards (both made by ATI) to even work together on OS9.22 !
Yep, it's definately nearly there now.
Illustrator, After Effects, FCP, QT are all there in OSX (native), apparently Photoshop isn't far off, and I'm sure Digital Voodo's drivers won't be far off.
I'm sure you won't look back once you migrate...
After several hours of frustration, I've gone back to OS9.1! Seems the problem is the combination of Digital Voodoo and Radeon sharing the same PCI bus under OS9.2.x
OSX has thus definitely gone on the back burner!