Mac or PC for editing?

[PJoseph]

Placebo, i never thought you were belittling anyone, just showing that coughing up the cash for the big gear (even though it's cheaper now than ever) or needing all the funciontality isn't always an option for everyone. And I too would tell everyone to get on a Mac and load it up with Final Cut. For workflow, it's the only thing I could ever use. I pretty much use my system every day for something industry related. I use the iLife suite for all sorts of things as well, and they flow beautifully with FCP. And, I'm also only using a 12'' powerbook - I don't even need the full setup (but there is a slight cheat in that because on my shows, we always have fullly optimized AVIDs on a fiber op, BUT like I said before I have edited pacakges, promos, and shorts for air on this little sucker and they worked out great!) Out here, it is all Mac for the offline. pJ

[BUTCHYPIE]

Well, I'm in Edit Suites almost every day of my working life. I work on high-end boxes like Discreet's Flame and Avid DS, as well as Mac-based solutions like After Effects/Final Cut. Sometimes in the field, we cut on Mac laptops. Here's my take on things: 1 - if you can afford it, Mac with Final Cut Pro is hands-on the best solution. Add Motion to the mix and you'll be able to do a lot of really cool things in just a few days. Learn After Effects, and you'll be able to do just about anything editorial. More and more post houses are turning over the higher-end boxes for Mac-based solutions. Learn these now, and you won't go wrong. I use both PC & Mac in my everyday and professional life, so I can say without predjudice that the current hardware and OS for Mac rocks. 2 - if you need to stay on a PC, Adobe Premiere -- IN THE LATEST VERSION ONLY -- is functional enough and stable enough for home and student users (wedding video cutters, etc). Adobe really wants an editorial product in their catalog, so they've been improving Premiere. However, it's still not Final Cut Pro. You can definately get by with it, but if you don't have to, get FCP. 3 - if you have to stay on PC, happen to have an Intel-based PC, research the idea of running OSX on your PC. An editor buddy of mine decided to play with running FCP on a spare PC intel machine of his, and he had it up and running FCP -- very robustely, he said -- within an hour. Of course, I would recommend you use a spare drive for this (not sure dual booting is even possible in this scenerio from one drive). Anyway, he's working on a dual-processor G5 here at work and says his hacked Intel PC box running OSX does almost as good a job. (Although I'm geek-girl, I won't give you advice on how to do this, since I'm not THAT geeky -- Google is your friend). I use a MacBook Pro with 2GB of ram and an external Firewire 800 drive for my digitize, and I can edit as well as on any of the Avid systems in-house. Not to mention, you can run Pro-Tools for audio, if you're looking to learn that as well. Hope that helps! If you're cutting anything zom related, please share with the group! -

[PJoseph]

I think every working editor on this board is going to suggest Mac based systems. Sadly, we live in a PC world, so many PC users haven't experienced them or just don't like them. I get it too, I hate PCs and I had to buy one for an online project I produced and I couldn't believe I was shelling out money for a PC. I was born and raised on Apple computers (I wrote grade school papers on a Mac SE), so without question Mac is my choice just for daily use. And then once I got into the industry, it worked out that Mac happened to be the professional system used for editing. Interesting comment about your friend running FCP on an Intel PC. I suppose it should work fine since it's designed for the new Mac architecture. I hope all this advice is helping everyone! pJ

[MikePizzoff]

I think most people on this board can't afford to shell out $700+ for a new Mac then to turn around and spend another $1,300 on Final Cut.

[PJoseph]

Mike, I agree with you and I explained that exact thought in all of my previous posts. My feeling is that if you are working with what you have, and that is a PC, then you should get what works for you and within your budget. No one should feel that in order to edit they have to own the top of the line gear. You can make great stuff with simple gear. I'm a firm believer in that. Just learn to tell a story and make it interesting. That's more important than the buttons you press. pJ Also, If you are thinking of a Mac, there are low prices to be found. They refurbish them, have decent student discounts and also sell a stripped down version of Final Cut for about $300. So, when you start to budget out systems, look at all the options. You don't need the big dual G5 with two 17'' cinema screens to edit. You could do a Mac Mini for $800 (I can't see what the student discount is, but it's usually about $50-$100 less). Macmini is pretty solid as far as hardware - 80 gig drive and fast dual layer DVD burner! If you have a monitor and keyboard from an old system, you can start editing right out of the box. The computer is loaded with iLife, so you could edit in iMovie HD, write the score in Garage Band (license is paid for) and burn in iDVD which works well. That already is as good (in my opinion) better than any of the prosumer editing software on the market for PCs. Add $299 for FC Express and you've got a powerful system. So, there are options in the Mac world if you want to make the jump. pJ

[placebo]

Another thing that should be pointed out is the advantages of OSX itself. Many PC users think of Apple in terms of different hardware. However, that's only a small part of it. OSX is known as the "most advanced operating system on the planet" for very good reason. Because it is! Not only is Apple hardware better (especially on pro systems), but OSX has so many workflow advancements over XP that you begin to think of XP as a toy. As I've mentioned, there's color management. But there's also a little app called automator. Which gives you an interface to connect actions with. Each action has many options, such as file input/outputs, actions allow you to completely automate most operations within the OS. For instance, you can set an action to pull all the files out of a folder, apply a photo filter such as say solarize, convert all files to a different format, dump the output files into a different folder, delete the original files AND folder, then open each file in a particular application. You can use automator to change attributes of thousands of files at one time, then dump all files into a network drive and delete the local copies of those files. And it isn't hard to do, each action has inputs and outputs, so inside the automator app, you drag actions around connecting them to each other, then once you have them how you want, you just click 'run' and the whole thing goes down in front of your face (if you choose to view actions as they're run) or else you can choose not to and it happens behind the scenes. My point is that the reason the Mac is such an able system for editing and multimedia is that's the market the Mac has existed in for years, and the demographic it's targeted at. So Apple has developed features in relation to content creation. The entire system just screams 'visual workstation'. And it won't be until Windows Vista that MS comes even remotely close to anything the Mac has to offer. And that's because Vista is a direct rip off of OSX.