NLE on MAC vs. PC
 

Hi all.

My wife has developed an interest in creating digital copies and editing of Hi8mm video. For her first project she attempted to take many years of clips and edit this onto one VHS tape for sister using an older Dazzle product.

I must say that this was excruciatingly painful and SLOW. The project took months and met with limited success. I'm not sure if the problem was our PC (PII 400Mhz), or the Dazzle unit, or both. For this and other reasons, we've decided to upgrade our computer, and can't decide on a PC or MAC G4/G5, which has come highly recommended by a neighbor.

We are looking for speed and ease of use, which may favor the MAC. However, this comes with a price and our funds are not unlimited.

Please help me decide on a platform.

All advice appreciated.

Thanks.

Mike

The Mac will come with iMovie, a basic video editing program. It is easy to use, so easy my 10 year old son edits his own videos on his 3 year old iMac. If you or other members of your family are students, work for schools etc. you will probably qualify for Apple's education discount. Ease of use is a subjective qualification. Some people find Macs easier, other find PCs easier.

One big advantage hardly anyone mentions is the virtual lack of Mac viruses. If you've ever had a problem or worried about viruses on your PC, you can almost give up worrying with a Mac. PC viruses don't directly effect Macs and very few viruses are written for Macs. It's a little peace of mind.

Jeff,

Thanks for the reply. The virus issue is one the advantages my neighbor brought up, along with some others that people in this forum are already aware of; irq and driver conflicts, incompatiblity and configuration issues, to name but a couple.

I was unaware of the Apple educational discount. My wife is a teacher, so how would I find if she qualifies, and if so, what the discount is? Is this an Apple direct offering only?

Thanks again.

Mike

on the apple website go to education, its somewhere in there

i used to try and edit video on my pc, a 2ghz p4, and it was ok, but nowhere near as easy as mac. so i switched. i use a powerbook g4, started with imovie, and then went to final cut pro 3. highly recommend.

the switch is painless, just burn cds to copy files over, or send them over your home network.

i got used to os x in like 3 hours.

Re: NLE on MAC vs. PC
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Mike Bradley :My wife has developed an interest in creating digital copies and editing of Hi8mm video. For this and other reasons, we've decided to upgrade our computer-->>>

Are you also planning to upgrade your camera, or will you still be using hi-8? I think that iMovie only supports DV via firewire, doesn't it? You would still need to capture your analog video and convert to DV using a device like the Dazzle over firewire (unless you get a tower machine that can take a PCI card).

I'd suggest that you also upgrade to a DV camcorder, it will make things much easier and faster plus the quality will be way better. There are some inexpensive models available now.

I would also vote for the Mac, but I'm biased ;-) If funds are tight then have a look at the eMac. The base model is about $800 (G4/800)

Alan and Boyd,

Thanks for the info.

Boyd -- we have upgraded to a Sony DV27. However, we have much in the way of old Hi8 tapes that need to be digitized. I guess I'm stuck buying another Hi8 camcorder just to be able to transfer them???

I'm not familiar with the DV27. Does it have DV pass-through? If so then it can convert analog to DV. Otherwise you could get one of any number of devices that will do this, or possibly use your existing "Dazzle". There are pretty inexpensive firewire converters out there, like the DAC-100. I'm sure this would work with Final Cut Pro, just not sure about iMovie.

I don't understand how another hi-8 camcorder would help. Or do you mean that you no longer have a hi-8 camcorder?

iMovie doesn't care, as long as it comes in on FireWire.

Boyd,

We no longer have the old Hi8. The DV27 has DV pass through, but that won't help with the Hi8 tapes.

I just noticed that your "signature" lists you as being in Medford.
I live in Medford also.

I see. I guess you would need to start and stop the camera manually, since the playback controls wouldn't work... right?

Really (Medford NJ)?... small world! If so, drop me a private e-mail (see my profile). I have a couple old hi-8 camcorders at work and can probably loan one to you for long enough to digitize your old tapes.

iMovie2 is really easy to use although some people at my school had a really really bad experience with it because of bugs (all their clips mysteriously disappeared on a large project). I'm not sure what iMovie3 is like, although it seems like it has bugs too. iMovie seems to be rock solid when you have less than 100 clips and not that many edits.

Premiere 6.5 on the PC is ok but is sometimes confusing and frustrating.

I found Final Cut Express/Pro to be intuitive except for capturing, which you need to consult the manual or an online resource for (try ken stone's FCP website; google search for it).

PCs are more user friendly and less crashy nowadays. You typically don't have to worry about IRQ conflicts.

For family videos and such either an iMac or a PC should be fine as long as you aren't using a lot of filters and titles and other things that need rendering. A PC might give a bit better speed/price ratio.

i like to import using imovie
and edit with final cut pro

although im sure im breaking lots of rules there :)

Some of the Sony miniDVs will play Hi8 directly.

The jury is still out on the new G5's as to their speed vs. a PC. However, a G5 might be overkill for what Mike and his wife have in mind. If you're looking for iMac's, they just got a speed bump today to 1.25gHz, USB 2 and some other features.

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.