Opinion's on moving to Mac for video editing please?

My brother wants me to produce some film footage using an HD camcorder and edit it into a series of 30 / 45min documentaries for his business, so they have to look & feel professional. I am looking at my PC and thinking 'will you honestly cope with it?'

The current PC is an HP AMD dual core 4400, 2Gb RAM and
ATI Radeon HD2350, Vista and 2 x 300Gb HDD (1 is USB). There is a Firewire 500 port.

I had a demonstration of a Mac Pro today in town and was suitably impressed. It was a 2.5Ghz Intel, 2Gb and running the latest OSX (Is it Leopard?) plus the basic Studio Pro editing suite. It was slick and responded to every change immediately.

I might have already talked myself into this, but are there any similar PC video editing packages that would give me the same professional finish using the unit I currently own?

Am I really having a laugh expecting my PC to operate as smoothly as the Mac Pro? I've never owned an AMD processor PC before and whether it's Vista or not, I am finding it less a leap forward from my last PC and more a sideways step in all honesty.

Any thoughts?

 

Go for it...iMovie beats any windows alternative everytime.

I'm a Vista x64 user with a similar set up to yourself and I know what you mean when you say it's like a sidewards step.

 

Glad to hear it isn't just me, but frustrated at the same time. Perhaps Vista SP2 will rock

 

Do it! Join Us... May I reccommend looking at the iMac though, as whilst it isn't as powerful, it is a hell of a lot cheaper. Check it meets your requirements in terms of "snappyness" though

 

You could always download and play around with trial versions of something like Adobe Premiere or Vegas Studio to see if your current computer is up to snuff.

 

I love Macs, I wish could afford to get one. Especially if you're in the arts.

 

I use my Mac Pro for editing the HD stuff on my site I love it, I really cant stand Windows now. It took me a full year to really get settled into OSX (Before that Id primarily still be on Windows), but now that its set up, man, its great.

 

Pros use macs. But if you're on a tight budget and can't afford a bitchin' mac system, then get a windows software and upgrade your RAM. CPU is good enough.

 

Your Windows box does not sound like a slouch so I would just go with that unless you are already in the market for another computer. The multimedia gap between Macs and PCs was closed like 10 years ago so it's all a matter of superficial preference... Personally I've been growing distant from Macs, they're definitely not as impressive as they were in 1993 when my school got them.

I have however had the pleasure of using Final Cut a few years ago but despite it's strengths, I can't say it's better in any way than Premiere, except perhaps in the learning curve area.

 

I still use a PC for certain things but the Mac wins hands down for video/audio editing. I use it for music recording/editing and it works a charm - thats the whole reason I got one and I don't regret it :thumbsup:

 

I'm taking an audio recording\engineering course (as I'm sure I've mentioned before) and there is no program that comes close to matching Logic on the Windows platform in it's price range. FL Studio, Sonar and Cubase all have powerful features, but when it comes to ease of use and access to features, they don't come close. Pro Tools is for both platforms, but I haven't had much experience with the app. I do know, however, that almost all major studios use Macs with either Logic and Pro Tools, as I've seen myself.

 

Thanks for the responses! One last set of queries for those who have specific HD editing experience. If I am going to be editing material to produce on average a 40min documentary would a 500Gb HDD be too small? Am I really needing to purchase a 1Tb drive? I'd imagine that the HD file sizes are pretty high, yes?

Also is the Firewire 800 now an industry standard on most HD cameras or is it still 500? I'll admit this was the first time I had even heard of the FW800 I/O.

Now all I need to find is a decent HD camcorder.

 

Man, this sounds like quite a large project!

I've used Premier, Final Cut, and the latest iMovie for various little projects. If you want professional looking videos I'd recommend Final Cut or Premier. iMovie is a pretty basic video editing program. Especially the newer version. While it is intuitive and easy to use, they took a step backwards with the lack of some key features such as video effects and things like that.

You must have a nice-sized budget if you're thinking about purchasing a Mac Pro and an HD camera. h: Not to mention the editing software...

Good luck on the project!

 

Well, I've got 2 decades worth of experience using various audio / midi sequencing packages on a variety of computers, but never visual media. In my previous job I clocked up several hundred hours editing and when I saw the Mac Pro software running it immediately made sense to me. There appeared to be a rather basic, but none the less impressive Final Cut lite and then the top end Studio version. Must look the software titles up, but it is ran into about £900 and seemed to be all singing and all dancing. The resulting video footage from the few minutes of tinkering were very professional and of broadcast standard!

My brother's project has been in the pipeline for almost a year now (longer than we thought it would take tbh) and we've looked at his side of things prior to looking at the technology involved. All going well the hardware, software & camera will be used on a series of short documentaries and / or productions.

It really comes down to how quickly I can get up-to-speed with the material and how transferable my audio engineering skills are in relation to visual editing lol - whole different ballgame I realise!

Mac computers were always considered far more reliable for audio engineering, I assumed it might be the same for other media. As always there is a debate as to whether this is the case or not and I can see the advantages of sticking with PC, but I'm taking on board the advice re Mac usage.

I once made the mistake of accepting the first opinion offered to me re PC audio engineering and regretted it. The software was excellent, but the PC was rather lacklustre. Things do move on a pace however.

There are another few weeks or so to consider this before I sit down with my brother and we discuss it properly. As for a budget it is a 50/50% situation with my brother, so we can afford to consider better equipment than we could individually.

My feeling is that we should trial run using lower spec software and an upgradable computer (i.e. perhaps entry level Mac or the current PC with a larger HDD and some more memory), but the camera is something you need to get right from the off!

Thanks everyone!

 

Youll need huge, and quick, harddrives if you are editing uncompressed. If you get can by on PhotoJPEG or a decent compressed format, you dont need all that much space, but speed is still a virtue.

Be warned, the lower level Macs cant be upgraded that well. My mac pro has 4 pci-e slots, youll be in good shape with that

Let me know if you have specific questions. Im not very good with Final Cut, but it doesnt take much to see how powerful it can be The only issue Ive ever had with Final Cut is a problem with the damn compressor not wanting to do FLV lol, but I think that was just fixed. Apart from that, Ive never had Final Cut crash, and OSX crashes very rarely (though I seem to be able to make Windows crash all the time, quite the opposite of 10 years ago. My computer teachers hated me, I kept crashing the Macs without trying)

 

Thanks Borman. It depends very much on the camera we select, but I suspect it will be raw material, uncompressed pre-edit. What is worse, using the camera as part of the editing process and perhaps wearing out the heads / laser on a hugely fragile and expensive HD camcorder, or perhaps just investing in a 1Tb hdd that 'should' handle the data?

If it's anything like audio editing, then you know the particular parts you are looking to edit anyway and it's not like I am going to stick 1 x 40min long unedited piece of film / audio and then start to chop it up.

I'll no doubt have a series of snippets and bits that then splice together and the audio can be overlaid / dubbed and edited in to make the entire thing seemless. <Cough! Hark at Peter Jackson here eh!>

I have the option of perhaps going for an earlier Powermac G5 with a dual 1.8Ghz processor & Apple Cinema TFT (20") which is actually on eBay at £650 BIN (there are 19 of them being sold off in London). Would this be a huge step backwards by comparison to the newer Mac Pro dual Intel Xeon processors?

Please accept that question in the spirit it is intended. I've never used the new Intel based Macs. The demonstration was impressive, but are they any better in terms of efficiency over compatibility? A lot of people hate Intel processors by comparison to AMD for example?

Would the older G5 be sufficient as perhaps a starting point with a better camera and perhaps older software such as Final Cut Studio 5.1?

It might be incorrect, but I previously had a Powermac G4 and despite it being on a pretty slow spec processor it always seemed to have plenty of omph, although I never attempted anything as processor hungry as this!

As others have mentioned, I have had the uncanny ability to utterly stall XP and even hang-up Vista (in the short period I have been using it) whereas I can only think of one occassion when my OSX Tiger MAC refused to proceed.

 

Yeah, the Xeons are quite a bit faster. There should be a bunch of benchmarks available, but its quite clear that the Xeons are that big of a step up. In my opinion, AMD has fallen behind Intel right now.

Im assuming no one around you has a Mac Pro or a G5, so you really wont get that in person comparison. You could make do with the G5 though, they arent slow machines in any regard, but there IS an obvious difference when working on HD video.

 

Ugh. Avoid the G5, esp if you want HD.

And DON'T get one big hard drive. Get 2-4 identical sized hard drives and set them up in a striped array for video editing.

Hardware wise new Macs and new PCs are pretty much the same under the hood. You're paying for the UI (OSX vs XP) and the software.

If you want to use the Apple Final Cut suite, go Mac and OS X.

If you want to use the Adobe suite (Premiere, Encore, etc.) go PC and XP.

Either one is perfectly capable. It really boils down to what you need and actually purchasing a proper setup. If you just walk into a shop and buy the first PC you see on special it's not going to be the ideal editing platform same as if you tried to use a Mac Mini as a HD editing workstation.

-hl718

 

Excellent hands on advice from you both, as frankly I don't know a single person who owns a Pro Mac and in actual fact I am struggling to think of anyone who owns any Mac units at all. The Apple centre locally has only been open a few months now and the previous independent Mac seller was known to be overly expensive.

Dell is based here so they have tended to dominate the local scene in the same way that I guess Microsoft must do so in the Seattle area lol. Everyone works, has worked, knowns someone who works for them. To purchase anything other than a Dell is a crime. Thus, I have an HP!

However in talking to a colleague at work about his web-design he happened to mention that he used Premiere and was willing to let me see it running so I can compare the PC against the Mac.

I'll back to you on this, so thank you for the advice!

Now I am going off to establish which HD camera's are worth looking at. I've got my eye on three at the moment 2 x Canon and 1 x Sony and they are semi-pro units.

 

for HD camera's i'd go with sony as they are really good, i've seen a few diffrent HD camera's being used and the sony (forgotten which one) was the best in terms of being easy to use and the picture qaulity was very good considering how the camera was used in a normal and non-normal way.