First of all, I forgot to write down the specific model, but his has a Large screen with USB anf Firewire ports lined up behind the screen on the right-hand side. Hopefully, this helps.
The details that I did remember to get are:
iMAC
OS X
PowerPC G5(3.0)
CPU 1.8 Ghz
Mem 256 MB
Bus Speed 600MHz
HD ST380013AS (74 GB)
Matshita DVD-R UJ-825
When capturing video through Firewire with iMovie, I can get it started, but the video is obviously skipping. It won't capture more than 20 seconds before stopping on it's own. It's also segmenting clips in the middle of a clip, which tells me that some skips are so large that the timebase function thinks a new clip has started.
Does the hardware of this computer have the necessary horsepower for decent capture? Is there anyway I can prioritize CPU processing for the iMovie program (diverting more resources to it.) Is there a setting to improve disc access? I've told him to bump up his RAM for video editing and such, but I don't know if more memory alone would help with the capture process.