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**SpiralDragon** · 20 May 2004, 23:48

is there a reason you are sticking to a mac system rather than a x86 based system... ie.. do you intend to edit on FCP only? or are you intrested in an Avid system insted?

Avid works on mac and windows... FCP only on mac...
i know you can get avid on a student discount for maybe around $500 insted of the regular $1,600... i dont know about FCP...

IMO Mac systems (although they are great) are limited in their upgradability.... if you plan to start with something small and then move up expand go with an x86 system as it will open up more posiblities for you at a cheaper price....

and i would advise you against buying a used computer of any breed... think of it this way. computers are like underware... personaly i cant stand waring someone elses underware... you never know what that other person might have had.... or done

needles to say this is just my opinion and i am sure there are some who will disagree with me and even provied you with a better solution...

besides.... Matrox grafics cards dont work on Macs as far as i recal

**UtwigMU** · 21 May 2004, 00:32

For about 40% of the price of dual G5 2.0 I built myself a dual PC (dual AthlonsXP @ 2.26GHz - 3000+) that is almost as fast as the fastest mac (beats the mac in Cinebench, looses in Photoshop), has Parhelia, 6 PCI slots and 14 drive bays - much more expandable.

Problem with macs is that only the high end G5's are competitive in price/performance and even then if you order your own parts from something like Newegg (in USA), you can build faster/better computer.

The G4 boxes like emacs - for about the price of emac, with 1GHz CPU you can usually get a Dell with LCD screen (or big high end CRT) with 3GHz CPU.

Furthermore, WRT to videoediting - you need at least two drives or better yet RAID0, RAID10 or RAID 5 array of 2-4 drives.

Consider that the G5 tower has only 2 3.5" drive bays, which means, you'll have to use external FW drives or get something like XServe (which again has astronomic price).

Unless switching to Windows/PC would severely degrade your productivity or you have a large investment in software for the Mac or you are tied by workflow and cooperation to Mac platform, I seriously urge you to consider PC.

Arstechnica has a good orientational system guide of 3 models. Considering your budget for upgrading RAM, CPU and getting external DVDRW is $1300, look, what can you get for similar money on the PC side.

As for Powerbook - Apple laptops are competitive. Make sure you have required drive and price out neccessary upgrades (DVD burner, aditional RAM) before buying it. For RAM go to crucial.com

Also Apple offers only 1 year of warranty and charges extra for 3-year Applecare. You know that when your laptop is out of warranty and something happens, you'll have to replace it.

And AFAIK, only 1.25GHz G4's can be upgraded to 1.4GHz.

Why one would want to pay $500 for 1.4GHz CPU, when 3.4 P4 can be had for $415 or 3400+ (2.2GHz) Athlon64 for $404 is beyond me.

**UtwigMU** · 21 May 2004, 01:05

Why don't you get something like:

Code:

  $89 Antec Truepower 550W Power supply
  $55 Chieftec DX01BD black case, 4x5.25", 2x3.5" external, 4x3.5" internal
  $20 4xZalman F1 80mm case fan

 $201 Asus PC-DL (Consider Iwill DH800, 64-bit PCI, more expensive)
      3xATA, 4xSATA, 1xAGP Pro, 5xPCI 32-bit,Audio, Gb LAN, Firewire, USB2.0
 $522 2xIntel Xeon 2.66GHz Retail CPU (you might want to get Swiftech Xeon coolers, quieter and better for overclocking)
 $264 2x512 Corsair XMS PC3200 (CL 2-3-3-6)

 $155 Matrox Millennium P650 dualhead, dual DVI, for WYSWIG plugins, you'll have to get Parhelia ($342 for AGP 8x)

 $248 2x Seagate 160GB SATA drive (boot and edit, you can get 3d drive and have 2-drive stripe or mirror + boot drive)

$1554 TOTAL

All prices from Newegg.

**Technoid** · 21 May 2004, 02:37

AFAIK, Raid is only neccesary if you intend to capture analogue.

with FW its not even nessesary to have a second drive if your main drive is big enough

**Frank Marshall** · 23 May 2004, 16:16

Hi cheesy15,

I am one of the few Mac lovers around here and yet I do indeed drive a PC. Like you, I had to slap together a VES (Video Editing System) on the cheap, although I was and still am working with analogue footage. No matter how I jigged the numbers, even compariing second-hand Macs with new PCs, I just couldn't justify sticking with a Mac. DV/FireWire evens things up a lot but on a tight budget, you would still be looking at a slower, second-hand Mac compared with a faster, new PC.

It's true that high-end Macs and portables are cost competitive with their Wintel equivalents but these are very expensive machines and certainly out of the price-range of someone on a "shoe-string budget." The good news is that you don't need that kind of power to start out in video editing, especially if you're using DV/FireWire; look at my system specs for a basic analogue VES! Any new PC is essentially capable of video editing, beyond which your gains are basically in rendering and compression speed, and storage capacity.

Build your PC with quality, name-brand componentry and you will generally enhance compatibility and overall stability under Windoze. BTW I would recommend an ATI Radeon card over the P650/750 as the Matrox cards seem to have issues with video editing. Do a search here and in the Matrox hardware forum to find out more... The Parhelia is good for video work but dear. Though a single disk system can suffice for DV, I think it is much better to have a second, fast and large hard drive dedicated to video scratch duties.

To address your specific concerns, the second-hand eMac's 40gig HDD is good enough for small projects but you will be disappointed when working on middling length projects such as weddings and holidays; you need at least 80gigs for comfort. Recently prices for 120gig HDDs have fallen to where they're not much more than 40gig drives and are much better value. The eMac has severe limitations in terms of upgrading but if you're really cramped for space you could do worse. I would seriously look at a new eMac though and weigh up the iLife software bundle, larger hard drive and juicy DVD burner against that second-hand machine with its FCP and AAE software. Maybe you could get those applications cheap, second-hand?

Beware the G4-350/400 *Yikes!* models which had PCI graphics. Go to the LEM (Low End Mac) website to get clued up on issues with these models - http://www.lowendmac.com/ The *Sawtooth* G4-400/450/500 is the earliest thoroughly modern (AGP, ATA66, 100FSB) Mac. Check the upgradability of G4 towers at Accelerate Your Mac http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ to see if there are any *issues* because quite often, there are.

The G4 laptop may be attractive in terms of portability but you pay through the nose for that convenience. Anyone on a budget should only consider a laptop if they really, really, really NEED portable computing. The RAM is often different (SO-DIMMs), the hard drives are smaller and slower (2.5" 5500rpm), upgrading the cpu is often difficult or impossible, and so on. Specialised parts like these are plainly dearer than their common desktop equivalents. In addition, any peripheral for a laptop is going to be dearer than desktop verion because you will either have to pay a premium for the enclosures on external devices, or the expensive expansion bay connections and casings for swappable devices. Just check the pricing on an external DVD recorder and compare that with the regular internal ATAPI version.

Fromage, the average Apple user owns a BMW and earns over US$50k a year. If you can't afford a nice new G5, you really should seriously consider a PC, which will allow you to tailor your rig according to your specific budget limitations using modern componentry. If you really must have a Mac be prepared to compromise on speed and upgradability (not just cpu upgrades - consider RAM and graphics too) to stay on the Apple platform. A second-hand Sawtooth G4 tower should be your starting point and any newer or faster tower you can afford, a big bonus.

**fromage15** · 27 May 2004, 23:03

thaanks for the reassurance

well this quelled many fears....i originally wanted a PC, but everyone has been all "get mac...mac is the best....mac is the one and all".....so now i'll look into a PC.

I am not a huge fan of Avid, admittedly.....it's too messy for my taste. i really like the feel of FCP. i heard Premiere is good, too......agreed?

**Frank Marshall** · 28 May 2004, 06:39

FCP and Premiere are very similar to work with. I have wondered whether Apple didn't poach a few of Adobe's interface designers when they built FCP...

**nunchalnaomi** · 28 May 2004, 12:30

Hi,
I agree about the pc being a better price piont. I think the ati all in wonder . Or better yet the asus 9800 xt with two moniter plus Vivo capabilities would be a better video card for capture . Matrox rt.x100 being best. I use premeire 6.5. I like that all my adobe files are useable, including .psd files with layers. I would get a good power supply ( antec 400 or something reliable) , a asus mother board and at least 1 gb ram. You can always add the 2nd hard drive and more ram later. But ideally end up with a raid plus 2 drives, a dvd burner, and a 2 moniter set up, using premeire or ulead would be a good editing system . With that in mind, you might research a little more and wait for pci express. It has much fatter two way graphic pipes , much better then 8x agp. I researched my computer for about a year, before taking the plunge in dec 2002. I have had a lot of tweaking to get everything to work correctly together. Especially the audio synch with analog capture. But now it is a fast system that is a pleasure to work on. Except for an occasional crash . ARGGGG Realtime preview on a tv moniter became very important. Get the best parts that you can afford for a long term investment. I think it is better to build a bare bones system of good parts, then a complete system full of crap. Are you going to be capturing analog video, or just using dv and editing? Also remember most software has a student price. You will also need a dvd authoring program like ( reeldvd or dvdit) I think both the matrox rt.x10 and the rt.x100 have a good software bundle if you are going to do capture. You might take a look. Take a look at the matrox system recomendations. And stay away from audigy sound cards. I had many problems with audio capture synch. I built my system and had problems, but it was worth it. I hope you build one that suits you. Nunchal

**Frank Marshall** · 31 May 2004, 06:39

To build a VES on a shoestring budget, I suggest you do some research first. Try the AnandTech website and check out the current Budget PC Recommendations. Sneak a peak at the Mid-Range PC Recommendations as well for possible inclusions, depending on what you can afford, what your particular needs are, and how future-proof (upgradeable) a system you need. ArsTechnica and Tom's Hardware Guide have similar system building recommendation articles, though Tom Pabst comes in for a good deal of abuse around here.

What you will find are common threads in the hardware recommendations. They all recommend an AMD processor, especially the 2500+, they also agree on an nForce2 Ultra400 chipset motherboard, Western Digital 7200rpm hard drives, 2 x 256MB DDR RAM and ATI 9200pro graphics cards for a budget build, for example. If you're working with analogue footage, make your ATI 9200pro a ViVo (Video In, Video Out) variant, add a second Western Digital hard drive (probably the 120gigger) and you've got the cheapest analogue VES possible. This is the card I am looking very closely at. The only thing stopping me is that ATI are about to announce a new entry-level card this week called the X300. I will base my decision on early reviews, how long the X300 is projected to take to reach the market and how much it will eventually cost. Early rumours are that it is going to be twice as powerful as their current 9200.

A step up from ATI ViVo is the dearer but very robust ADVC-100 analogue solution. This is an external digitiser that connects to a FireWire interface on your computer. It converts your analogue footage to DV and back again if you want to go back to tape. If you don't need to go back to tape, there's the ADVC-50 which is cheaper and doesn't have video-out. This solution has garnered rave reviews and is very popular because it really works as advertised and is simple to use (both of which are surprisingly uncommon in the PC world), however it is too expensive for my budget, maybe for yours too? If you're using a DV camcorder, either add a cheap PCI FireWire card to your build or choose a motherboard with built-in FireWire from the recommended options and you will be away for perhaps even less than the ATI ViVo solution.

Of course more RAM, faster CPUs, and specialised Real Time video solutions will enhance your video editing capabilities but the main advantages will, as mentioned previously, be in the areas of faster renders and compression. You will also be able to perform colour correction, complex layering and special effects more effectively but it is unlikely you will require this kind of power until you become more skilled at non-linear video editing.

If you need more help, please specify whether your source footage will be analogue or digital and what kind of projects you will be working on. The requirements for a basic system for editing home footage are very different to those you would need to create commercial productions.

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