Alan, I used to do that but it was just a waste of time rendering. You can import using Final Cut Pro (the right way, avoiding timecode breaks) and use DV start/stop detection. The downside is that it's harder to take notes since iMovie would tell you what clip you were on.

MOST of the digital8 line will do this. Sony watered down this line a lot and took out features so the new cameras are not as good as the old ones. I think it started going downhill with the TRV130 family (then the TRV140 and TRV250 families).

<<<-- Originally posted by Nathan Gifford : Some of the Sony miniDVs will play Hi8 directly. -->>>

This had me going for awhile because I remember that the hi-8 tapes are a different shape and size than the miniDV cassettes. Then I realized that you were actually refering to "Digital 8" which can record in either digital or analog mode. Do they still make these? I don't hear much about that format anymore. Regardless, "miniDV" would not be compatible with hi-8 unless I'm very mixed up (which is always a possibility ;-)

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but no miniDV camera play Hi8. Some Digital 8 cameras can play Hi8, I think that might be what you mean.

i dont really understand what you meant
whats exactly wrong with importing via imovie and editing using fcp?

iMovie uses files in the DV stream format, while FCP uses QuickTime files. If you capture in iMovie the files will need to be converted, and you will use twice the disk space.

Thanks all for the replies.

At this time, I am leaning to the Mac -- probably a G4 DP -- due to what appears to be ease of use, performance and stability.

However, before I commit, I would like to know if there is anything on the PC side that will be almost as easy to use as FCE, and what would be a good, "middle of the road" config for the PC?

Thanks again for the help.

Mike

On the PC side the major ones are Adobe Premiere (Pro), Vegas Video, Avid, and Edition. I haven't really tried Premiere Pro, Avid, or Edition but I really like Vegas Video. Coming from FCE/FCP3 that program made no sense to me, but some people find it easy to use and very fast to edit with. It is a very powerful for video and audio editing work. My program at university (Ryerson Radio and Television Arts) uses that program as an audio editing application. There's a free demo on the Sonic Foundry website so you can try it out for free (probably the same with the other NLEs). It doesn't do titles very well, but if you're learning that won't matter much.

Premiere Pro is worth considering. digitalvideoediting.com gives it a glowing review.
Avid is the industry standard so you get to learn the Avid interface. That won't get you jobs though.
Edition has lots of real-time power and background rendering (wow) so you don't have to wait for things to render. My guess is that it isn't that great if you are learning to edit.

Sorry if I made things more complicated for you, but there is a lot of great editing software out there.

A good setup for the PC would be a pentium2.4ghz with hyperthreading, 1GB of RAM and plenty of hard disk space (RAM are storage are cheaper if you install it yourself and it isn't very hard- this especially applies to apple, which gouges you on RAM). Going higher than that isn't really worth it value-wise. You can go cheaper with a lesser Pentium or an AMD system. I'm not so sure that AMD systems would be good for video editing work though. If you want to encode DVDs then they are definitely slower. I'm not sure about rendering and the amount of real-time effects.

Dual monitors would be very nice to have, but that depends on your budget. You can get dual monitors on a Mac too.