Media100 to FCP?
 

I'm in the process of getting funds approved for me to change my edit suite from a Media100i version8.2 to the latest version of FCP..I havent gone to see a demo of a FCP system or anything..I'm basically going on word of mouth..Which my former college roommate sent me to this very informative site.(he recommends FCP)

I guess i'm confused with what the difference is between my hardware driven system (Media100) and the software based FCP..Can I still jump around from BorisRed and AdobeAE like i can do now?

I've been advised to get a G5 with a ton of RAM (4GB)..

You can jump around, you can set AE or another program as an external editor in FCP, and I think you can use Boris Red as a package of plug-ins within FCP. It ships with one or two Boris Calligraphy plug-ins, and Boris lists FCP for host support (I haven't used Red at all so I can't say for sure). FCP also supports many AE plug-ins.

A dual G5 is necessary if you want the most responsive performance, and I'm sure you do. I believe FCP will not make use of more than 2GB of RAM, but I suppose having 4GB could help with other apps, and I'm sure it can't hurt anything.

Thanks for the info.
 

I guess my fear is getting that bad-boy hooked up and having slower render times than i have now..Basically, i dont want a parallel move in systems, i want to move up...I'm sure a G5 will help tremendously.

Final Cut Pro will take advantage of up to four gigs of RAM, Motion 2 can take advantage of up to eight gigs

Keep the Media 100. There's no way a software based editor to be better then a Hardware one. The only thing you'll get better is the editing interface. As for overall picture quality and performance, media100 will be better.

I own a dual g5 2.7ghz with 3ghz of ram, and have final cut studio. Fast, but still needs rendering on certain effects ( not much of a deal since its 5 seconds for even the most demanding render tough).

Every big production house uses hardware acelerated editors. Probably what you should get is FCP with hardware acceleration- but I do not know anything about that...