Can of Worms - Mac or PC....

[mr_tony]

Looking at getting a new PC purely for video editing (might one day get the VMAX IV vid done then!).
Initially planned to get me a dual XEON machine from good ol Dell and run Adobe Premiere. Then I saw Final Cut Pro on the Mac and rather liked it, plus you can pick up a decent dual G5 machine now for around the same price as a decent dual XEON.

Anyone else coverted from PC to Mac? How did you find it?

[Andy M]

I did - best thing I ever did computer wise...

Wait until Jan 11th before you decide to buy

www.apple.com/uk/switch/

[rico]

I converted from PC to MAC about 18months ago after spending about 2 months trying to decide. I had a lot of advice from both sides, but it came down to a few points.

- software wise i just needed Word and Excel which are both available in mac format.

- price wise there was little in it. the Powerbook was priced roughly the same as a top specced Dell Inspiron

- size - Powerbook is sleek and sexy, the Inspiron is an ugly heavy brick

- reliability - i'm sorry, but i am yet to work on a Windows platform that i'm happy with. I've used a lot of them...

- Something different - i felt like a change

I'm yet to find a negative about Macs. Occasionally video files won't open easily, but then i just open up a program called VLC and 99% of the time they work perfectly.

Cheers, Rico

[jodypress]

definately echo all the above as i teach people multimedia and video editing on both platforms, but if you are just doing basic editing, you really don't need a dual processor g5.
i have been dong video editing since before firewire and pcs/macs are plenty fast enough now, just need big hard drives for storage (not a problem wither now)

[Bodo]

There's even a Mac bait for people with Asperger Syndrome:
www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/

And who thought you need to spend lots of money for software? TheGimp is already linked from the OSX download pages.

The only downside of the Mac is lack of support for mechanical CAD applications and hardware-accelerated OpenGL (which 99% of all users don't need anyway).

[mr_tony]

jodypress said:

i have been dong video editing since before firewire and pcs/macs are plenty fast enough now, just need big hard drives for storage (not a problem wither now)

Been using premiere on a 1Ghz pc recently and not impressed with the speed frankly, filters in premiere take hours to run sometimes. Besides, your pc can never be too fast can it

[jodypress]

true, can never be too fast, but i remember when i used my 1ghz powerbook to edit 1.5hr of raw footage of le mans 2003 to a 30min video and had no probs.

have to admit premiere is not the greatest editor, a bit buggy. try final cut pro. for advanced stuff, or simple linear editing. imovie is excellent.

go and buy one, you won't be dissapointed

[agent006]

the only time i've tried to swap to a mac has been when working in an entirely PC based office which has really doomed it to failure. If you're never going to be dealing with another PC then go for a mad, they're great.