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PC or mac for editing?


Jason Maeda

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i'm in the market for a computer to edit on. it seems like PC's are much cheaper than macs, but the mac appears to be more ubiqitous, at least in the photo/design world. i guess i'm asking for your thoughts on the advantages of either a PC running avid express or a mac running final cut.

jason :ph34r:

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Hi,

 

First off you should also ask on the forums at www.dv.com but I'm going to say my piece anyway as it's a constant bugbear.

 

Briefly, I think that if you are going to do end to end production in-house, capture and edit and have that be your online, the Mac has the edge only because of Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is somewhat more developed for pure longform editing than Premiere, but only slightly.

 

If you are going to want to make your edit system talk to bigger higher end ones, particularly Avids, you should get the PC and run Avid Xpress DV since there's no penalty for running it on PCs and the hardware is cheaper and more flexible. Equally, if you think you're going to be doing a lot of renderable effects, particularly if you have After Effects in mind, you should consider the PC, mainly because you can renderfarm a lot more cheaply with Intel hardware.

 

In my opinion there are only a few reasons not to go with the Windows solution, mainly down to cost and flexibility of the hardware, but also due to the proliferation of useful very-cheap-and-free video tools available for the platform. Dual Xeon systems can meet or exceed the latest Apple Mac performance, and the integration possible in an Adobe-based suite running Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop (and possibly Encore DVD) is not possible on the Mac with the discontinuation of Premiere on that platform. Encore DVD is, frankly, somewhat better than what Apple have, if that's important to you, and Encore isn't available for the Mac. It basically comes down to your having to choose whether you think the fact that FCP exceeds Premiere by enough to make it worth it.

 

Of course this cannot cover things I can't know about, such as your previous experience, company policy and good-deal purchasing accounts, etc.

 

Phil

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phil thank you so much for the information! your response does, however, provoke these ancillary questions:

 

"if you think you're going to be doing a lot of renderable effects, particularly if you have After Effects in mind, you should consider the PC, mainly because you can renderfarm a lot more cheaply with Intel hardware."

 

what does "renderfarm" mean?

 

"the integration possible in an Adobe-based suite running Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop (and possibly Encore DVD) is not possible on the Mac"

 

so, if i do go with a PC, does this mean that there is a possible down side to going with avid Xpress DV? does the "integration" of those programs you speak of trump the benefits of an Xpress platform?

 

lastly, is there stuff that i, as a total newcomer, would not know to look for when buying a PC for DV editing, but that you think are necessary or highly useful?

 

thanks again,

jason kollias :ph34r:

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phil thank you so much for the information! your response does, however, provoke these ancillary questions:

 

"if you think you're going to be doing a lot of renderable effects, particularly if you have After Effects in mind, you should consider the PC, mainly because you can renderfarm a lot more cheaply with Intel hardware."

 

what does "renderfarm" mean?

 

"the integration possible in an Adobe-based suite running Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop (and possibly Encore DVD) is not possible on the Mac"

 

so, if i do go with a PC, does this mean that there is a possible down side to going with avid Xpress DV? does the "integration" of those programs you speak of trump the benefits of an Xpress platform?

 

lastly, is there stuff that i, as a total newcomer, would not know to look for when buying a PC for DV editing, but that you think are necessary or highly useful?

 

thanks again,

jason kollias :ph34r:

Hi,

 

> what does "renderfarm" mean?

 

To use several computers to spread the load of intensive rendering. As far as I'm aware one of Adobe's stuff does this very well, but you can at least post a sequence off to a second machine to render while you continue editing on the first.

 

> so, if i do go with a PC, does this mean that there is a possible down side to

> going with avid Xpress DV?

 

Depends heavily on what you're intending to do with it. If your future involves a lot of offline editing of longform stuff that you will eventually want to online at a commercial suite, or if you wish to edit for film, Avid is the way to go (Or Final Cut with the film tools addon, but I don't know much about that. I believe it has been used to post at least one 16mm film to completion.) If you are considering taking your productions to their final online state on this machine, the Adobe solution is probably better and more flexible, particularly in the area of special effects and graphics.

 

> necessary or highly useful?

 

The only advice I can really offer is to think beyond the PC or Mac station itself. the requisite terabyte or so of storage isn't that expensive, but the rest of it is. The ancilliary equipment is probably going to cost you way more than the computer. You really should have a pair of decent VGA monitors for the desktop display and a proper broadcast studio monitor to look at your output, as well as a firewire-to-component video convertor to allow you to monitor your programme without composite video artifacts. You will find that you need a small audio mixer (I use the Foilio Notepad mini-mixer by Soundcraft), an amplifier, and a pair of reasonable monitor speakers. You will need a meter bridge; PPM for the UK, I don't know what arcane variant you use over there! You will need a DVCAM playback deck (which may double as your component convertor) such as the DSR-20 or 45, and a VHS deck for making viewing copies. Ancilliary equipment such as a waveform monitor, vectorscope and perhaps Beta SP record and playback wouldn't hurt. This is what I own (Except the BetaSP) and I find it to be barely adequate.

 

I have attempted to edit in suites which thought they could get away without all this stuff, and just gave me a PC edit station with a domestic TV hooked up to it. They were not happy with the results.

 

Phil

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I'm a Mac man myself. Have owned both platforms in the past, but after the

99th virus spam killed my old PC, I switched back to Mac again for good.

Life's to short.

I will however refrain from going into one of those mac-vs-pc wars. Suffice

to say is that Mac's and Final Cut Pro works

like a charm and it really is a very competent program: it can do all of

the basic things you used to go to an effects program to do. I did my

whole DVD reel on it with the use of Final Cut, Photoshop and DVD

Studio Pro down to the labelling on the disc and the box.

 

On the other hand the new Premier version for the pc is apparently very

good. Haven't tried it.

 

Finally, if I just might be allowed to stick it a bit to the PC crowd: it's

a complete myth that PC's are cheaper. That was 10 years ago. Today,

I'd almost say the opposite. At least with notebooks and portable

computers.

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  • 2 months later...
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I detest Macs (well Apple to be more accurate) with a passion. :angry:

 

However this is the one area I have to concede that FCP is the market leader - a lot of commercials editors use FCP in preference to Avid - I know of none that use Premiere.

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Hi,

 

Both FCP and Premiere are immeasurably superior to almost any Avid software (I didn't say hardware) in almost every quantifiable way. Premiere is much more of an all-in-one-box solution, particularly paired with other Adobe software, which for some reason is not the way that higher-end places tend to work. FCP has better interoperability, which explains what you're seeing.

 

Phil

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  • 2 weeks later...

Go Amiga! (hey, couldn't hurt, could it?)

 

But seriously, I do run Amiga editing software still on my brand-new Pegasos. (a brand-new PowerPC platform that comes with the Amiga-compatible OS, MorphOS) My usual trick is to use my Amiga software for single-frame manipulation before final editing with FCP.

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  • 1 month later...

I edit my stuff on a G5 at work, and i have a PC pentium 4 at home. it is amazing how the G5 runs faster and much more stable than the PC, which runs premiere pro. And not to mention FCP 4 hd, and shake, and all the other softwares that comes in the mix.... I would go with the Mac, even way over the price limit.

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