Video Editing System - purchase advice?

May 9, 2006 1:28 PM

Aside from price, are there any other reasons why I should not buy a Mac Mini for video editing? I want to learn how to edit video and maybe put together some short films. I can spend $1000-$1300. I've heard the defacto standard is Final Cut Pro. I probably don't need that immediately but if it's the standard i'd like to work up to it. I have two old PCs but no Mac experience.
posted by storybored to computers & internet (18 comments total)

I've heard the defacto standard is Final Cut Pro.

Avid is more of a defacto (pro) standard than FCP. For entry level film work, iMovie, Premier, and Vegas can all produce good results.

If you are seroius about effects-heavy FCP work, then you will want something with more memory and a better video card than a mac mini can support.
posted by b1tr0t at 1:37 PM on May 9, 2006

The price is the only reason you should buy a Mac mini for video editing. If you have the money, i'd get an iMac. They have better video cards, processors, buses, hard drives, and just about everything else.
posted by chunking express at 1:38 PM on May 9, 2006

Chunking, do you mean an iMac G5? Used would be in that range, not new. Also Avid has a free version that is a bit like iMovie, but with the Avid interface, so you can learn it.
posted by Gungho at 1:58 PM on May 9, 2006

What type of films? How many special effects? Any complicated composite titles? Motion graphics? HD or SD, do you already have a DV cam?

Hobby or for work?
posted by voidcontext at 2:06 PM on May 9, 2006

Unfortunately, video editing is about the most resource intensive thing you can do on a computer. Just looking on ebay, g5 imacs are going for $1100-1200, but you'll still need RAM and hard drive space. For the money you may be better off looking for a dual processor g4 with some memory and some hard drive space (because you'll need LOTs of both).
posted by doctor_negative at 2:13 PM on May 9, 2006

Just looking on ebay, g5 imacs are going for $1100-1200, but you'll still need RAM and hard drive space. For the money you may be better off looking for a dual processor g4 with some memory and some hard drive space (because you'll need LOTs of both).

As much as I like my macs, you can get a LOT more dell for $1200. A dual g4 is a fairly weak machine.
posted by b1tr0t at 2:30 PM on May 9, 2006

For around $1300 you can get a dual G5 Powermac, that will allow you to expand your machine as you expand your experience. These things can handle a ton of ram and storage, and it's easy to upgrade video cards. Final Cut isn't as much of a standard as Avid in post houses, but it is the standard for indie/lower budget film and video makers due to it's price and performance. People forget that what makes an Avid is the hardware and that's why it costs over 10x what FCP costs. I work with editors and they love our Avids but any of them doing their own thing at home use FCP. Skip iMovie, Premiere is garbage, and forget about the free Avid software. Start with Final Cut Express and grow from there.
posted by oldkentucky at 3:07 PM on May 9, 2006

Um, why's everyone talking about used iMac G5s? If you're going for an iMac, you might as well get a brand-spanking-new iMac with the Intel Core Duo for $1299, surely?
posted by chrismear at 3:41 PM on May 9, 2006

The 'de facto standard' depends wildly on what you're doing. FCP is kind of in that prosumer niche right now. A few studios use it, although usually in conjunction with something else as well. The big kicker is that it doesn't need any special hardware, and it isn't turnkey.

If you want to end up editing for a studio/production company, you're probably going to want to learn the turnkey systems at some point (this could be on the job, though).

This should give you a pretty good idea of Avid's offerings. You'd be fine with Avid Xpress & a PC, and it would probably end up being cheaper. I'd want a gig of ram, absolute bare minimum, & more likely 2 gigs. The more HD space the better. You *can* get firewire drives, which do have advantages, but when you can buy 250GB internal IDEs for not much money, there's really no reason to.
posted by devilsbrigade at 4:05 PM on May 9, 2006

I think the mini would be a terrible DV station on its own.

First of all, to get to the 1GB minimum that you'd even want to conceive of having, it's another $100 on top of the price tag. I don't know if you can open it up to put in aftermarket RAM, but YMMV.

Then there's the HD- 80GB? Please. In the video world, that's nothing. Prepare to replace it.

Then there's the graphics card. Oh wait, there's no graphics card. Here's the deal-killer for you- the Mini runs its GFX through the main processor, not a dedicated GPU. The Mini isn't much of a gaming machine, which means it's an even worse video editing machine.

If you're dead-set on getting a Mac, I'd consider nothing less than an iMac, and even that isn't a great machine for it. If price is your sole motivating factor, build a cheap Windows box.
posted by mkultra at 4:07 PM on May 9, 2006

Buy the best computer you can afford, but here's a reverse-caveat: My 733mhz G4 tower was my primary video editing machine up until a couple months ago, and it's a few steps back from anything you'd be looking at now. Slower machines do have drawbacks such as slow rendering of video effects/multilayer video, but they are still perfectly capable of running editing software and interfacing with the hardware you'd be using (DV cameras and decks, a/d boxes). So, don't be disheartened if all you can afford is a dual G4 or lower end G5.

That said, make sure you have at least a gig of RAM and as much extra hard-drive space as you can afford.
posted by jtron at 5:12 PM on May 9, 2006

i'm in a similar boat, i decided that rather than go out and buy an expensive machine to learn on, i'd get a cheap one and get my experience at a lower price point. That way i'm not wasting expensive clock cycles trying to figure out what the ` does in FCP.

if you are just learning a cheap machine might be the way to go, i was thinking about a mini as well, but your probably better off with an older imac for reasons listed above.

Also, look into a cheapish DV cam and Adobe After Effects, those coupled with FCP should give you the range to do lots of neat stuff.
posted by quin at 5:42 PM on May 9, 2006

but yeah, RAM get as much as you can.
posted by quin at 5:46 PM on May 9, 2006

"I don't know if you can open it up to put in aftermarket RAM, but YMMV."

Yup; putty knife to the underside and some faffing about to get past the drive tray. The RAM is standard DDR2-533 SO-DIMMs; 2 slots, meaning it basically tops out at a very expensive 2GB.

"the Mini runs its GFX through the main processor, not a dedicated GPU"

No, it has a GPU; it's just a fairly bog standard integrated chipset with a bit of codec acceleration for media center type stuff. What's bit of a killer is it shares memory with the rest of the system, which is already pretty anemic. Good enough for movie playback and zoomy windowing effects but not exactly aimed at much heavier than that.

Worse, that 80G HD is a 2.5" 5400RPM thing; similarly to the SO-DIMM memory, this is laptop-class stuff; expensive, slow, and not very scalable. Be prepared to fill the USB/Firewire ports up pretty quickly with external drives to make up for it.
posted by Freaky at 6:02 PM on May 9, 2006

I think it's worth your money to save up for a intel iMac, which is the iMac I meant.

And as others have pointed out, people have been editing video for quite some time, and getting by on slower machines. My brother some how does it on my VERY old blueberry iMac using iMovie.
posted by chunking express at 6:16 PM on May 9, 2006

Contrary to what several others said previously, Final Cut Pro is *very* quickly becoming the "defacto standard" NLE, even in professional circles. The main places where you'll still find stalwart Avid installations are in houses that have a mission-critical need for top-notch media management and group-based editing workflows, one of the only things that FCP is still sorely lacking in.

If you are seriously interested in learning software that is "standard" in the industry, and have no prior editing experience, I would heartily NOT recommend that you learn any of Avid's NLE applications first. Not only is the learning curve much higher with Avid, your likelihood of being employable is MUCH higher if you know FCP inside and out. Unless you live in a TV/film hub like LA or New York, Avid skills are becoming less and less in demand than FCP skills.

The post-production market is quickly shifting (and in many areas has already shifted) towards FCP as the standard NLE of choice. The facility I work at is one of the top 3 commercial post-houses in my city, and we dumped our all our Avid stuff last year in favor of FCP, and haven't regretted it (even our senior editor, who has been editing on Avid's for at nearly 15 years and has dozens and dozens of AICP and ADDY awards to show for it).

As for buying a Mac Mini, here's some perspective: I have a 12" 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook with 1.25 GB of RAM and a Firewire 400 external drive. I edit eight, 30-minute broadcast TV shows on it at home every month. It's not a speed demon. and when I use it, I long for my main Dual-G5 workstation at my office. But it definitely gets the job done for DV/DVCAM based stuff. it sounds like you're not looking to do super-complex jobs to begin with, so a G4 mini might serve you well, considering the price. I would try to find a used/refurbished Powerbook G4 instead of the mini, actually. For your budget, it will be more versatile than a comparable G4-based Mac Mini.

Keep in mind, however, that Final Cut Studio 5.1 is not supported on the Intel Mac Mini due to it's integrated graphics. It may "work" (or may not work, see http://www.hdforindies.com/2006/04/quickie-on-intel-mac-mini-and-final for more info), but Apple officially does not support it as a platform for FCP.

If you intend on doing editing on a level that transcends pure hobbyist or "tinkering around" motivations, then don't bother learning Vegas, iMovie et.al. And although I disagree with the poster that said that Adobe Premiere sucks (it used to suck VERY hard, but the new Premiere Pro is basically a completely new application that definitely gives FCP a run for its money. If I were building a PC based NLE, Premiere Pro would be the software I chose), I also wouldn't bother with it if your intention is to learn marketable software/editing skills.
posted by melorama at 7:21 PM on May 9, 2006

/winces at the badness of my grammar in previous comments... sorry.

FCP can definitely be haxored to run on older machines. i'm currently running a copy of 4 on a G3 and for the most part it works fine (though Soundtrack is a total loss, crashes on launch)

i work for a pretty big cable company (let's say the 2nd biggest) and they are in the process of converting from a no longer supported software package to "something else". They have been playing with all the different versions of Avid, FCP, and a few others. As luck would have it, i had a few hours of quality time with the head of Production and i showed her something i had thrown together the night before in FCP. She was very impressed. Not with the non-linear-editing aspect, that has become stupidly common with modern software. But with the little stuff you can do within the program itself...

[technical moment]

One trick i like is to use a gaussian blur in a dissolve, i think it adds the weight of time passing.

In FCP this is a truly trivial thing to do.

Her software doesn't support this at all and FCP was seen as a 'Holy Shit' kind of thing as a result.

Since i had no ideas of the limitations of the software they were using all i could say was 'wow, sorry. you should see what a dumb monkey like me could do with this and a copy of AE"

So while FCP might not be the current favorite, things may be changing.
posted by quin at 10:38 PM on May 9, 2006

Video editing hardware is one of those things you have to buy on the cusp of technology innovations, or as close as you can afford to, and replace on a quicker cycle than most other gear. The Intel platform is going to change the landscape a lot in ways that are just emerging, but it's very clear it's a much faster machine when apps are UB'd than a comparable G5. With video, faster trumps everything else.

The Intel machines are not nearly mature (the MBPs, for example, are having serious heat problems), which creates a quandary. And there is, as yet, no tower CPU pro machine with a CoreDuo. Do some book learnin' for a few months -- at a minimum the remaining G5 PowerMacs should come down sharply in price once the Intel dsktops roll out. Or buy the Intel iMac (haven't heard too many serious complaints yet, though a few), learn on it, and trade up if you get serious.
posted by fourcheesemac at 3:38 AM on May 10, 2006