On Wed, 07 Feb 2001 23:46:20 GMT, "Alexander Ibrahim" wrote:

>It is hard to say.
>
>PC hardware is faster, but the Mac is no slouch. It definitely
>does not suck.
>
>You can easily get the work done on a Mac though.
>
>There are a lot of reasons to be excited about working with video
>on the Mac.
>
>MacOS X
>HD editing support from Pinnacle and Digital Voodoo.
>FCP
>Matrox RTMac
>
>If you are learning on the Mac and are going to be more
>comfortable using it, then by all means get a Mac. Your comfort
>with your editing platform is a valid measurement of what you
>shoud buy. After all you are going to be the one locked in that
>dungeon called a "Studio" with the thing day after day, night
>after night, NOT your friends.
>
>I recommend a dual g4 733 with Mac OS X and FCP, 512 MB RAM a
>20GB system drive and a 75GB video drive. Buy the ram and extra
>drive after market as upgrades to your Mac, it'll be cheaper.
>
>Of course I am assuming you are working with DV video. You'll
>need more RAM and disk space if you work with uncompressed video
>or HD video.

The above is good advice, UNLESS you do a lot of video
filtering (I do - as part of editing I color-match
multiple cameras, color-correct, adjust gamma,sharpen,
etc.) - from what I've heard, render times for filters
with FCP are glacial compared with a decent PC with
Mini-DV...;-) Last night I rendered multiple filters
on a 15-minute video on an 800MHz/Raptor/Premiere
computer, and it took almost 7 hours. If what I've
heard about Mac/FCP render times is correct, that
would have taken roughly 24 hours! ;-)