Iv been in that situation, i built my own pc about 5 years ago to edit a feature that i had shot and i edited it on adobe premiere pro. It crashed twice and i had to re edit the film twice! then One of the fans failed and my mother board got fried. It cost me a grand to build and within a year it was lying in my yard waiting to go to the dump.

I obviously had a bad experience with built pc's and a lot of people have very successfull experiences and id never put you off buying one but it was enough for me to leave pc's for editing forever. I bought a quadcore G5 2.5 GHz with 2gb ram, two 20" monitors and final cut studio and iv never looked back, The whole system cost me about 5.5K but worth every pennyl. Its never let me down once.

The flaps inside the matte box are just to protect the lens although i fold them back out the road and leave them there.

As for the Hard drive a company i do some work for gave me one to test and get familiar with. They are great little devices but during my testing i did find on two occasions that it skiped a few seconds of footage, it didn't happen offten enough to become a problem though. What we did find is that if you are under the preasure of a deadline we found ourselves going back to using tapes. It also adds weight to the camera. I think in a situation like filmmaking where you have time to use one they would be fantastic to work with and with HDV you don't need to worry so much about drop out or timecode breaks.

All of this is just my experiences, ultimately you'll need to decide what is the best option for you given your budget restraints.

hope the cold gets better soon.

Andy.

$5500? wow... that price scares me.. Eventhough I will be paying that much for the camera.. That is a hard decision to make... Final Cut Studio 2 on a Mac...or Sony Vegas on a PC.... UGH!!

I would love to just go with the Mac but I just don't know exactly what I would be benifiting by going with Mac..I mean, if it wasn't so expensive I woudn't think twice..but for my needs I think the price is a little over what I am wanting to spend.

I would like to get something like the 40G Dr-hd100 so all I have to do is just take it from my camera and plug it into my computer and just drag the footage to the time line without having to render the footage... but aparently they are discontinued??

So far with everything on my list my kit roughly costs $12,700

HD200u $5400
Matte Box (one you suggested) $500
A/t 897 $600
Tripod (based on the B&H link you sent me) $700
FCS2+MacPro $5500 (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...dio_2_Mac.html)


But if we replace FCS2+MacPro with Vegas and a PC...

Vegas $500
PC $1300 including 20" monitor

Everything will equal = $9000

And neither include the hard drive...or a battery pack...

I now have a head ache...

is there any way you see that I could work with these numbers and get things cheeper and still have a fully functional kit? Maybe i'm over pricing stuff...

im afraid not your numbers seem about right. Of course if you keep looking on ebay or other second hand options you could save money.There is also the option of hiring and borrowing the gear only when you're filming. if you just bought the essentials like tripod camera and edit suite and hire or borrow the rest when you film then you could get that number down.

btw It wasn't $5500 it was £5500, i added ram and extra monitors and a firewire 16 channel mixing desk for ADR work and a hi def TV for previewing my work (which iv yet to get working properly).

Iv built my equipment up over the years adding to it every so often when i can afford it, its the only way to do it unless your loaded which unfortunately i am not :(

Andy.

:/ crap... well I'm on my way to getting things situated where I can afford to just buy everything out right. I currently run a small car "business" where I buy cars from car auctions, fix them up and flip them for a profit. I could currently just buy everything including the Mac but it would completely shut my business down. I have to wait until I double my investments which might take awhile longer than I had anticipated as I am not as skilled in the trades of the car business as most.

so $8600 for your editing suit?? wow.. well I suppose its worth it when you have a business that actually makes money. Me on the other hand, I just have a passion to make films. I always have ever since highschool. I remember when the xl1 came out, I had a fund raiser where people would donate toward my "camera fund raiser." I actually collected over 300 bucks during my senior year. But at that time, the xl1 was around $5500 so I was no where close. I ended up going to college for Anthropology and have just recently picked back up with my old desire to make films. Hopefully my efforts this time will be successful.

Hey Andy, thanks alot for helping me with this stuff, your opinion really helps. When I sharpen down a good copy of the short script I'll send you a copy so you can tell me how horrible it is haha.

-Terry.

Hey no problem, thats what this place is for. I remember the day before we shot our first feature in 2004 (i was 23), i was driving home from Edinburgh with my two company partners and we were all excited. That night all the cast and crew gathered on my patio for some wine and that night i knew it was gonna be a disaster.......i got a feeling in my gut. And sure enough our main location which was a woodland got chopped down by the forest commision and it rained heavily for two weeks solid. That coupled with the fact we knew nothing about feature filmmaking it all went wrong.

Just remember if your shoot goes bad its not as bad as it seems. So many mistakes we made but we came out the other end stronger for it, the film was never completed but we got some great experience about how to manage a film. The second feature was completed and with a lot less problems, we enterd it into the Edinburgh film festival but were declined.......oh well we had our own big premiere and everyone seemed to like it. Now with our promo for shadow land the production value has made leaps and bounds and its the first feature we're trying to get funding or investment on.

Be carefull if your thinking of getting investment and shooting it yourself, as i said first time filmmakers will most likely go wrong. If we had investors with our first film the stress level would have been rediculous and the fact we messed it up we would have been sitting in hot water.

The creative side is only a part of it, you need to be able to orginise locations, transport, food, lodgings, deal with problems when they happen, even quarrels with actors and still manage all your gear and stck to the schedule and all the while making sure your shots are good. Just so you know what you're up against, you can do it , you just need to be prepared which is why pre production is a very important time. Make a list of everything you need to do and tick them off when you know they have been secured, and listn to the opinions of the people around you.

I'd be happy to read your scrip when its done but you should know when it comes to scripts i always say what i think, scrip writing is no time to humour people and say its good. You need complete honesty from people reading your script or you'll get a tainted view.

Andy.

Yeah, don't do that.

It may not have sunk in too much yet, but I want to stress filmmaking is a collaborative business. You need other people not just for their skills, but just to make the process manageable. Don't try to do it all by yourself.

Really the only way to learn is from – and with – others.

Find an editor, find someone with a camera (or a DoP and operator), find some actors that are willing to help you realize the script. There will still be plenty of challenges that way.

A lot of people starting out will participate for 'credit' (and experience) with deferred salaries.

Wait with buying a camera , any gear really, until you know for a fact that it will be what you need.

George/

Good advice, it also means that because camera technology moves so fast by the time your ready to buy there may be new technology available to you.

Andy.

Terry, that's wierd! I'm currently in school working toward a double major in Anthropology and Film Studies with a production emphasis. Our first feature was fraught with difficulties as well, still not done editing (I'm thinking of starting the edit from scratch - ick). You don't need a top of the line machine for editing, I'm running with a dual 2.0Ghz G5 and it edits HDV just fine. Just puts tons of RAM and tons of Disk space.

I used to edit on a Performa 475 (definitely not DV)... You'll always get lots of responses from people giving ideal setups for editing, the truth is that you can halve that budget for the hardware and be really happy with what you get! I started the edit of the feature on a dual 1.42 Ghz G4 with an older version of Final Cut Pro.

Stop thinking ideals and start thinking what will get the job done within your budget.

This is true....But it seams that I cannot get anyone supporting me to understand this. They still think they can just shoot a movie by themselves without organization. Every time I say "well we need a script" ..one of my friends goes "we don't need a script, just have fun and it will all come to you.." needless to say he still lives in candy land with the keebler elves if he thinks life is just that easy. That might be fine when you are just shooting home movies in your back yard...but he tries to apply that same logic when we go to the movies. We seen "Hot Rod" awhile back and he always uses that as an example..."see they just had fun and their movie was awesome!" And when I try to tell him otherwise, he argues with me like hes been in the field for 20 years. He expects when I get this equipment that I'm just gonna hand it to him and go "have fun!" all I have to say to that is "HAHAHAHAHA"

When I say I'm alone with this stuff, I mean mentally haha...

That would be great...I need constructive criticism, or atleast honest criticism.

How far along are you with your degree? What in particular do you find interesting in Anthropology?


What do you suggest in terms of a Mac machine? Something that isn't too expensive and will run just fine while editing HDV..? I honestly have never used a Mac..the only time I ever touched one was to check my email on a friends Mac book...

Of course... I'm not spending any money until I know exactly what I need. I've been researching this for about a year now and haven't bought a single thing.

I obviously don't know your friend so i won't comment on him but i do know my friends who work with me, we talk to each other and listen to each other and we are always willing to hear and consider any opinion or idea. We are all very much on the same page and having gone through two feature films.....problems and all we still love working together. You need people like that around you or you'll just end up fighting with each other.

Ask yourself this, do you both like the same films and have the same ideas as to where a film career will take you? do you both want to do the same job? are you both as serious about filmmaking as eachother?

Its important you work well together.

Well, he and I have ambitions in the same directions only I have ambitions to do other things as well. He simply wants to make comedy films and he believes that his ideas (mine included) are good enough to perpetuate the film(s) to success. However, he doesn't show any interest in contributing other than to be an actor in a film. Every time I bring up our budget, script or pre production preperations, he says nothing for about 2 minutes then acts like I said nothing at all (kind of like a little kid would..) and goes on talking about something else.

I think if he sees things happening, he will become more involved.

I'm a couple of semesters and my field school away from completion on both majors :) I like that anthropology is mostly a conceptual look at the overarching systems of humanity, I find that fascinating which is probably what I love about film as well.

For a mac, you can edit HDV on anything they currently have out... including the iMac. You'll want to max it out for RAM and buy the biggest internal HD and a large external as well. I use a weibetech (sp?) drive dock so I can buy inexpensive internal ide drives and connect them when I need them.

My workflow is when I fire up FCP I set the scratch drive to whatever project folder I'm going to work on. When I switch projects, I just have to switch folders which makes it possible to have each project I'm working on reside on an external drive (120Gb can hold 5-10 10 minute short films - depending on how you capture the footage and how much audio work you do in soundtrack. I have my feature on a single 250Gb drive, which I've backed up out of paranoia to another).

With this setup, as I run out of room, I just buy another inexpensive ide drive and edit away without cluttering up my system drive. I've currently got about 1.5-2 Tb of drive space in smaller chunks in a stack of internal bare drives on my desk.

You can probably hook up a decent editing system with Final Cut Studio and a bunch of RAM and HD for (checking apple store) $1599 for the 20"iMac with max HD and RAM and $1299 for FCS full license. You can get about a $100 discount on the machine as a student ($1509), but I wouldn't get the *amazing* student discount ($699) on the software as the license doesn't allow you to make projects for commercial use.

I would add the apple support plan to the order too, just in case...cause electronics break. I would make sure to wait until after this week though as the WWDC is coming up this week and there's usually something introduced there that can potentially drop prices.

Hey Cole, I went to the Apple Store and looked at their refurbished units but they didn't have anything with the right combination of RAM and disk space...So I went ahead and built one and it costs about $3800.

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...uWPEcCo/1.?p=0

I got 1TB of Disk space but only 2GB of RAM as well as a second 20" monitor. Only thing I don't have on there is the protection plan. I want to get 1TB external HD but where would I go to get one those cheap for Mac? TigerDirect...?

Terry do you plan to make this on your own?...i.e you and your friends?.......if so you'll need the advice of the people on this site as you go. There are many people here willing to give you advice and guide you through it the best they........we can.....ask questions, theres a lot of filmmakers here of all skills.

It sounds to me like you are, given that you are buying or considering buying the gear to do so.

I made my first film cold turkey before i knew of this place, i wish i had the knowlage and experience of the people on this site to guide me then........it may have been completed.

Andy.

Andy, I certainly plan on doing this myself. I am not one to give up on anything. This has certainly been something I have been wanting to do for quite a long time and regardless if my friends I started this thing with are with me, I am going to go through with it. I know once I get everything situated it will not be hard to find participants. The friends are still a little afraid of change, and this for them is a big change. I think it simply scares them that there is a big price tag on this. They don't understand where the money is going and are re-contemplating going through with it. I think maybe thats the reason they are acting so akward when I bring things up. Me on the other hand, I have been investing thousands into vehicles not knowing if I will get my money back. Luckly I was successful and am making a good profit. The biggest thing they have invested their money in is gas...

This forum has certainly helped me out. In fact, it has taught me everything I know about the business. I kind of like to think of it as the big Verizon network...ever seen that commercial with like 1000 people behind this one guy walking down the street? Hmmmm....wonder how I could actually organize that.... :)

You have the right attitude towards filmmaking, It's going to be tough and i know its easy to start second guessing yourself about wether or not you are shooting it properly and getting the coverage you need...........i was the same and i still am. It gets easier to see the angles and anticipate problems.

All i can say is stay focused and do the best you can and most importantly enjoy it.

All the best of luck.

Andy

Out of my mind last night at the casino playing black jack and won $500. Then got home and found a $100 chip in my pocket under my keys haha... think that might help me out a bit here...

CHEERS!

My advice
 

Terry - my advice is before you go any further buy and read this book:

http://www.medialawyer.com/indiefilm/excerpt_1.html

It's the best book out there that I have read letting you know what you are really in for in terms of legal logistics if you want to make a potentially successful indie feature film. It's a couple of years old but the legal landscape doesn't change anywhere near as rapidly as the technological landscape.

Then I'd buy and read this book

http://www.livingspirit.com/GFMMB1.htm

It's the best hands on guide to writing, directing and producing an independent feature I have ever come across. It's very thorough (it's from a UK point of view but all the practical aspects are very sound). The technological parts are also going to be a few years out of date - but 98% of it holds up in terms of what actually needs to happen in terms of making a film.

These two books are small investments - and while they won't really help you make your film (trust, nothing but actually going out and making stuff ever really helps you learn what you are ultimately in for) they will give you a fair indication of the mountain you actually have to climb if you want to make and release a truly independent feature film that actually attracts international sales.

What you want to do is hard. Prepare yourself as best you can.

Hey thanks alot Craig...I actually found The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint on Amazon for cheap and have it in my cart..

LOL, Terry I'm sure you'll do fine.

What? the Casino? haha! You should have been there to stop me I was up $1000 and lost $400...

Hey! I went to the Apple Store online and built this machine...

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...Us4EB5G/1.?p=0


What do you think?? do I have the power where I need it?

Terry the link doesn't work for me.

Man it's 01:15 and iv got a recce for a job tomorrow at 8 in the mornin and after havin a drink with my buddies i am not lookin forward to gettin up..........worst of it is i know theres no point to it, the only reason for going is to see how my hd100 reacts to the low light of a ballet theatre and iv since been told the lighting guy won't have it ready for me to test it.

Completely pointles venture at a horribe time of a sunday morning............sorry just venting some frustration :).

Andy.

This should work... http://store.apple.com/us/configure/...A?mco=NzQ3Njkz

All I did was go to Apple Store website saw their deal on the Mac Pro at $2799, went down to one 2.8GHZ Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors from two, then upped from 2GB to 4GB of ram and upped it to 1TB of HD space. It equals out to $3100 and free shipping.


:/ Ugggh...that sucks..especially on a Sunday. The night I came back from the boat I had to get up at 8 and didn't get home till 6:30!