pc or mac for editing

yamo

i know the mac has been the industry standard for editing for the last few years, but are there pcs up to the job? am in the process of setting up a production company, and would like to have some manner of basic editing facilities in the office for pilots/roughcuts etc. am trying to decide between an imac (1700€) or a pc around the same price. is there much difference between the functionality of premiere/final cut etc on pc?

Lump

You can't get Final cut on PC, that'd be one difference.

John

monkeyfudge

I find Final Cut Pro is an easy enough programme to teach yourself...

And Final Cut Studio has lots of great stuff to make your productions look very professional, including DVD Studio Pro.

It will set you back another €1300 for the studio pack though.

finnoodles

well!!!..............

For someone who is starting up their own company Final cut pro running on a mac is definitly the way to go, it gives you more functionality at a cheaper price. PCs are of course "up to the job" but are generally a more expensive option (you would pay more for Avid software). You also need to figure out who is going to be using this system. If you are going to learn it yourself or if you are planning to gire someone in. If it is a case of hiring in, it is currently much easier to find an experienced Avid editor than a Final cut Pro editor, and at the moment it is IMPOSSIBLE to find ANY editors out there. This may seem irrelevant at the moment but it wont be when you end up have to pay double the normal price for an editor because you are THAT stuck.

hope this helps (also hope it makes sense----its kinda early for me )

F.

Oh yeah and i would recommend the G5

niamha

You may think that a PC with Adobe Premiere will do for now but it WON'T. Macs do come in more expensive but you wont find Final Cut, Avid, Pro Tools on a PC and the list goes on.
Plus the options these mac programmes give you are so much better, can be transferred to other edit suites and most of all won't crash on you every 5 minutes with large files like Premiere would. Most mac editing programmes give you much better export and compression options too.

Dont waste your time or money with a PC. Oh- and there is this clearance section on apple.ie for products they have repaired and wanna sell off- about 30% cheaper so you might be lucky, i think you have to check it at noon every day or something.

Good Luck!:)

decob

niamha wrote:

You may think that a PC with Adobe Premiere will do for now but it WON'T. Macs do come in more expensive but you wont find Final Cut, Avid, Pro Tools on a PC and the list goes on.

ehh!, avid does run on a pc!!

niamha wrote:

Plus the options these mac programmes give you are so much better, can be transferred to other edit suites and most of all won't crash on you every 5 minutes with large files like Premiere would. Most mac editing programmes give you much better export and compression options too.

Dont waste your time or money with a PC. Oh- and there is this clearance section on apple.ie for products they have repaired and wanna sell off- about 30% cheaper so you might be lucky, i think you have to check it at noon every day or something.

Good Luck!:)

premier wouldn't be the first pc editing programme that i advise someone to use, actually i wouldn't advise anyone to use premier, nor would i begin to even compare it with fcp.

Also i don't buy into this bull$h!t that macs are better than pc's. They both have their good and bad points. I will admit that the Final Cut studio is quite good in that all that apps are integrated so can be useful.

So to the OP, you've got 2 option, mac with fcp or pc with possible avid express or avid free (certainly a better option than premier). As
someone else said, who is mainly going to be using it? as you'd be best to tailor it to what they prefer.

Lump

I used FCP the other week at a training course, about 15 minutes in, I crashed the mac totally.... everything can be crashed.

John

decob

all we need now is someone to say that mac's can't get viruses..

monkeyfudge

decob wrote:

all we need now is someone to say that mac's can't get viruses..

To be perfectly honest it would be very strange to encounter one. I've been using macs for about 10 years now and have never come across one.

They are over priced and the build quality has been going down the toilet though. I have many PCs and MACs in work... I'm far more likely to have someone come up to me with a problem because windows has got itself into a state than OS X... but I get a lot more physical technical problems with the MACs that are bloody expensive to repair.

You can sometimes pick up a good deal on a mac on boards.ie/adverts.ie. I got a G5 Powermac recntly for just €630 and it's working out really well, I got it to replace a G4 that got damaged in a powersurge and would have cost at least €500 to get repaired, it's now acting as spare parts for my other G4s.

reece

intel chip based macs will be able to run xp. So you can have the pc experience on the mac. Then use the mac for your video editting. I find premiere to be a piece of crap and note that adobe are really slow to issue bug fixes.

Dustaz

niamha wrote:

Macs do come in more expensive but you wont find Final Cut, Avid, Pro Tools on a PC and the list goes on.
Plus the options these mac programmes give you are so much better, can be transferred to other edit suites and most of all won't crash on you every 5 minutes
Dont waste your time or money with a PC.

Someone has never used a pc....


PCs are now more or less the industry standard for high end editing for numerous and valid reasons. If your going to be doing all this yourself, then a mac and FCP is probably the better option for you.

Fenster

Its a bit moot now, the Intel macs boot Windows natively, giving you the best of both worlds.

OS X on Intel is a little light on "heavy" software right now as programs like Photoshop will be a while in coming to x86 native - its not worth running a big program under Rosetta without a beast of a machine due to the overheads.

lodgepole

Personally I would choose Avid on a PC over FCP on a MAC, but that's my personal preference. There's not a huge amount that one can do over the other and either route will get you a powerful and professional edit suite, that will give excellent results. It's all down to what you and your employees are comfortable with. I'm a long time PC user so it makes no sense for me to use a MAC (though i'm fully capable on FCP).

Don't believe the hype... Mac's don't outperform PC's in regards video editing.

-DuMbGuM-

For video editing, a pc definatly. we all know of the die-hard mac fans swearing by the media editing abilitys but in my opinion a pc, with a nice dual core processor, plenty of memory and hard drive space will do quite nicely for you if your entering the buisness professionally

Best of luck m8

Lump

I love the way you reply without backing up your choices. Mac's have benefits, PC's have benefits. It totally depends what kind of software you want to use, and what you want to use the computer for in general.

John