That being said FCP isn't the end all, be all of editing but for it's price (and speaking in generalities) it doesn't have an equal.
Originally posted by: paralazarguer
That being said FCP isn't the end all, be all of editing but for it's price (and speaking in generalities) it doesn't have an equal.
You're talking bang for the buck?! HA! That might work if you didn't have to buy a $3000 piece of crap that's half as fast as a $1000 PC counterpart. Geezz....I would think that the hardware difference would more than make up the extra software cost on the PC side.
Who cares about mac emulation anyway? It's useless. FCP isn't all that. It doesn't even have the most market share amongst pros. It's just a program much like its peers in the PC side of things...
Originally posted by: Hulk
I'm running Ulead MediaStudio Pro 7 on a P4 2.4
I do a lot of video editing for local school systems and the system works amazingly. Capturing dv via firewire is flawless, and has great scene detection. Analog caputure using my Matrox dual head card is also great.
The real benefit of this system is that my system is real-time for almost everything I do, sometimes up to 5 video layers deep. That's real-time with NO hardware assist, AND the preview out to TV using a dual head card, like Matrox or ATI with theater view.
The new version of this program has been completely recoded and smokes! It's also dual threaded and hyperthreading enabled. I can only image how fast it would be with a dual Athlon or Xeon system, or a 3.06HT chip.
Actually, it's fast enough for me since almost everything I do is RT.
The cool thing is that there's a color coded bar above the timeline that informs you of the cpu loading for each part of the project. White>light pink>dark pink>red
My system will do real-time until I get to red, then the playback will start to drop frames. It's great because it's scalable to the system you are using. You can also set at which level of cpu loading you would like the preview section to be pre-rendered, I set it so that all red areas are prerendered. When I upgrade to a HT P4, I expect pretty much everything I do will be RT.
I suggest you download the trial of this program and give it a try, the trial is fully functional for 30 days. Note that you can load tiff images with the trial due to licensing agreements.
BTW, the titler in the editor is also pretty powerful, I rarely have to use a dedicated titling program.
Once you've experienced RT you can't go back!
Originally posted by: Cadaver
While the Mac does have some broad appeal, it truly is a niche computer. And as such, there are certain areas where is excels.
One is system-wide color correction. Far better on the Mac than the PC. Take a poll of professional computer artists and see what they think. This is the reason why Adobe gets 40-50% of its revenue from a company that has a 4% market share.
Another area where the Mac excels is in video editing. While Avid still dominates by numbers, a full blown avid system is still much more expensive than a fast dual processor G4 and Final Cut Pro. Throw in DVD Studio Pro and you've got a $4500 system that's hard to beat for twice the price. Can it be beat? Sure. For this amount of money? It's a tough one.
Despite these advantages, the Macintosh is still relegated to a small niche market, home users who don't need to deal directly with heavy PC integration, and creative types.
While I use both a Mac (Dual 800MHz G4 w/1GB RAM, OS X) and a PC (home-built Athlon XP 2000+ w/ 512MB RAM, WinXPpro) 50-50 at home (academic medicine, medical imaging, research writing, medical student teaching), I use a PC 90% of the time at work since it integrates well into our infrastructure and custom applications.
Computers are tools, and people should select the right tool for the job. If Final Cut Pro gets the job done for you with least amount of headache, then choose FCP. So be it if it runs on a Mac. Wintel machines have so many advantages, they don't have to have them all. Even if every video editor in the US bought a Mac, it still wouldn't change the general market by much. PC users, have no fear.
The vast majority of Avids used in post production run on Apple hardware. The advent of FCP and DVD SP is just bring Apple software into field already dominated by Apple hardware.
Originally posted by: Cadaver
One is system-wide color correction. Far better on the Mac than the PC.
Originally posted by: paralazarguer
The vast majority of Avids used in post production run on Apple hardware. The advent of FCP and DVD SP is just bring Apple software into field already dominated by Apple hardware.
For no reason other than graphics artists and file makers are just that. Artists. They're not hardware geeks. If the program can run just as well on a PC (which even has less expensive capture boards of the same make) and they run it on a mac, well, that's pretty silly.
Nope, not even close. In fact single CPU PCs costing 1/3 the price of the dual-CPU Macs waste them pretty badly in most things.PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25 Ghz = pentium 4 2 ghz?
BTW there are HUGE differances in the two chips. you cant really compare them correctly.
You mean CISC? And...you're full of it.the mac is a RISC chip and the Pentium is a normal chip.
they both have their strengths and their weaknesses. if you want to to photo editing, go for the mac. but poor boys like me cant afford them
Originally posted by: MachFive
Your statistics are stuck in the dark ages.
In the past 3 years, Apple's marketshare in professional graphics markets has DROPPED. Over 50%. You know why this is?
Photoshop is faster on a PC.
Premiere is faster on a PC.
After Effects is faster on a PC.
Lightwave 3D is faster on a PC.
Maya won't even RUN on a Mac.
Just about the only "niche" remaining is full-time video editing, and that'll be gobbled up by AMD, Intel, and Microsoft within the next 2 years.
If you want to think for the future, build a $1500 computer, dual-monitor (CRTs of course) and learn the PC software. With a faster computer, you're going to be more productive, which will make up for the fact that video editing software on the PC is still about 6 months behind Macs.
Then, in a year, when PCs have surpassed them in that FINAL remaining niche, every Mac user in the professional world will be obsolete, and you'll still have a job.
Fin.