Buying a Mac

busterkeaton wrote on 5/4/2007, 12:14 PM
If you worked at a company that had a license for FCP, but the Design Guy stole that Mac, and you wanted them to buy a MAC to do a dual boot MAC/PC dealie so you could install Vegas, which Mac would you get? It would have to been fairly low priced.

Do the same issues of setting up a PC for video apply? 2nd hard drive, etc?

Comments

OdieInAz wrote on 5/4/2007, 1:09 PM
Depends. With the company spending $$$ Labor, I would pick the machine that didn't slow down the labor. For my personal use, I run V7 on a Mac Mini with CoreDuo, 1GB RAM. Capture onto the resident drive,and render to a network drive. Runs fine for me.
Former user wrote on 5/4/2007, 1:23 PM
OdielnAz,

What are you using for the PC OS. I have a friend who is new to Macs and would like to set up Vegas on his mac.

Dave T2
Coursedesign wrote on 5/4/2007, 7:26 PM
Get a refurbed older version Mac Pro. Good prices, same warranty as a new machine, and you can still extend the warranty to three years with Applecare.

Mac Pro has the advantage of better graphics cards than the others, which is particularly important if you want to use Motion, which is quite handy (and the new Motion 3 is a stunner).

You find refurbs on apple.com, easiest is perhaps to check the announcements on macnn.com where they usually flag fresh availability (which varies daily) right at the top.

Next best? Well, the MacBook Pro is real nice (although of course eminently stealable...).

There is the new iMac 24" but it has card limitations and will cost you about as much as a refurb Mac Pro.
OdieInAz wrote on 5/5/2007, 10:03 AM
I am using WinXP Home SP2 with Boot Camp. I split the 100G hard disk into 80G for OSX,20G for WinXP. MacDrive 6 lets XP use the OSX portion.

Only issue I have had is with DVDA. It won't burn a disc if the VOBs are on the OSX partition - must be something with MacDrive. So I prepare the onto the WinXP partition.
Former user wrote on 5/5/2007, 11:10 AM
OdieInAz,

Thanks for the info.

Dave T2
Cheno wrote on 5/6/2007, 10:08 AM
2.66ghz Mac Pro here, 3 gigs of RAM - System drive is 250 gigs so I used bootcamp to split that into an 80 gig XP drive and a 130 gig OSX - More room on the OSX drive as I stuck a 500 gig internal SATA drive in as my render / capture drive for the system (NTFS) - XP Pro SP2 for OS - I'll wait for XP to be completely unsupported before I even look at Vista.

works like a champ but still have the OSX side with FCP Studio when I need those elements - I render to firewire drives formatted FAT32.

Hopefully Leopard will offer a good software dual boot option - Motion, Compressor and DVDSP are AWESOME compliments to Vegas.

vitalforce wrote on 5/6/2007, 10:17 AM
I just ordered a Mac Pro and researched the issues a bit. My wife didn't like me putting down $2499 for it but it has a lot of future-proofing built in. When working between OSX and XP I am cautioned to plan ahead for the fact that OSX can read and copy from NTFS formatted drives but will not write to them. Thus an NTFS drive either has to be reformatted as FAT32 or else you need an additional OSX formatted drive to copy everything to.

In addition to Boot Camp there is a popular software called Parallels that is being raved about, to switch between XP and OSX programs in realtme without re-booting. However, the software manufacturer is presently trying to get an update finished so Parallels runs better specifically on the Intel-equipped Mac Pro.

P.S. If you do chance into a refurbed Mac Pro I am also advised to have at least 2 GB of RAM which enables full use of available bandwidth for Final Cut Pro.

P.P.S. I don't own FCP but can't wait to see what Vegas 7 can do on a Xeon Woodcrest machine with four cores!