FCS2 on the iMac?
 

My PC laptop which I was using PPro to edit on, died. I was looking to switch to FCS2 cause I have a 24" iMac I recently bought that I use for interent. I can't afford to dish out $2,500 for a Mac Pro, plus $1,000 for a display, plus $1,300 for FCS2 when I don't even really shoot anything serious at this point.

I'm tempted to buy FCE, but I want to shoot some 24P widescreen stuff (I have an XL2) and make DVD's with menus, so that's out.

I currently have a bone stock 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 gig of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT w/128MB, and 230 GB drive w/180MB of space left over.

Do you think this setup will cut it for now? I can upgrade the RAM, no problem if needed.

You can run FCS2 on the 24" Imac. Motion and Color are the two pieces that really tax the CPU cores.

Just max out your RAM for doing preview renders in Motion.

-gb-

I've got it running right now on a 17" Intel imac without any real issues. 1GB of RAM.
Motion doesn't work too well with real-time previews, but it does work.
Color would be more ideal with a higher resolution monitor, but I've been using a two monitor setup so there is room for all of the windows.

If you max out your RAM though, you'll see that Motion will be able to do more complex RAM render previews. I have my G5 iMac maxed at 2gb.

-gb-

Try also to upgrade your GPU if possible as it will make big difference for Motion and Color. Most important of all: get a separate hard drive for your media. Keep your software on your system drive and set your scratch disks to capture to the external drive. A firewire drive should be sufficient for DV or HDV editing. They are relatively inexpensive. I know it sounds like you have plenty of space on your existing drive, but keeping both media and your applications on the same drive will drive your computer mad. G-Tech are a good make.

I picked up FCS2 today and got it installed. I gotta pick up some RAM and a HD tomorrow.

Is there a specific feature I am looking for in a HD? When I had PPro, I just ran it all off the internal HD. I dont' know anything about what I need in an external HD for editing.

For an iMac a Firewire drive is your best bet. Here is a link to a good reliable product, the G-Drive-Q
http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVEQ.cfm
Connect it to the FW800 port on the back of your computer. There are other types of drives on the apple store website such as LaCie. Avoid using USB 2.0 as a connection as it is not really suited to video.

I have a 24" iMac and installed everything on it from FCS 2.
I also have 2gb of memory.

Motion runs good on my machine, and color runs great.
The only thing that sucks is Compressor and Batch monitor. They both seem a little slower. I tried to set up distributed processing, but it only seemed to make the export take 3 times longer. I also have only done 2 jobs with the new software, so I have a bit more ready to do.
I dont think it helps by sending 9 weddings to compressor at the same time.

Color loaded and runs on my Core Duo Macbook, as well as Motion on 1gb of memory.