You're not telling us what your editing needs are. What are you going to edit?

I got Raptor drives for working with uncompressed video, because it was the best way at the time. Today, those are a bit long in the tooth imho. The 74GB are fast but small, the 150GB seem less peppy and still not that big.

If you're not going to hammer uncompressed or something nearly as disk intensive, terabytes of disk are embarrassingly inexpensive nowadays.

RAM is only expensive if you buy it from Apple, but for this class of machine the specs are truly critical. OWC is the best outside source and just as good for far less.

Instead of asking which machine might be 1% faster on some benchmark, how about looking at practical factors?

Do you need to exchange footage with FCP users? Plenty of those around.

Do you need to work with 10-bit footage and higher at least occasionally? FCP can, Vegas can't.

Could you save a lot of time by using Motion and LiveType to create really attractive titles that blow away what you could create in Vegas with any of the currently available 3rd party packages?

Do you need to create interactive DVDs that can be done in DVDSP but not DVDA?

etc.

I think it is just plain great to have both Vegas and FCP. They have complementary strengths, and it is very common to have to work with people "on the other side."

Having a Mac with FCP makes that so much easier, and they are great Vegas machines as so many have said here already.

You can still get a full Final Cut Studio on the cheap as the upgrade deal has been extended through next month, just do a search in this forum for details.

You'd think that, after all this time, I'd learn to be more specific in my wants/needs :-)

First of all, I was planning on getting 2 gigs of RAM (4 gigs on a Mac is WAY too expensive!!), 2 additional hard drives (500 GB.), the ATI Radeon card and the 23" cinema HD display monitor.

As far as my uses, I've got several friends in the area who use Macs for their productions and would like to be able to share with them a bit easier than I can now.
I'd also like to be able to take advantage of Live Type.
I haven't gotten into HDV yet but do have access to a Z1 whenever I need to use it (gotta love friends with toys!!!).

The way I look it, there's nothing wrong with learning another app.

Lastly, when I import Photoshop files, Final Cut Express displays them as a multitrack video sequence, placing each Photoshop layer on its own fully editable video track.
Haven't we been asking for this in Vegas for some time now?
:-(

Mike

............The way I look it, there's nothing wrong with learning another app........
learning different apps is a good thing ,, if you want to learn the FCP app you have no question.to be answered.

...and you can easily make time-lapse movies with iMovie HD.

It really couldn't get much simpler than that. :O)

Wish I had known about it earlier...

the core 2's still outrun the Xeon's, right? You can get core 2 macs now.

Also, buy an extra copy of XP & get XP running on your Mac too. Then you've got both: Vegas & FCP on 1 machine!

>>>>Could you save a lot of time by using Motion and LiveType to create really attractive titles that blow away what you could create in Vegas with any of the currently available 3rd party packages?<<<

No. because you can do a lot better with aftereffects already without having to buy a mac :-)

You can certainly do better, but you won't exactly "save a lot of time."

You can do the same thing (time-lapse) with Scenalyzer and a PC.

Which are you more EFFICIENT on?


Decision made.

>>...Photoshop files, Final Cut Express displays them as a multitrack video sequence...

FYI: Boris Red does that too. Makes a lot of cool things possible.

This is a very easy choice. Mac is better but Windows has the software. So the answer is

Mac is better..

In your opinion, in what ways?

Mike
(who's never owned a Mac)

The Xeon's on the Mac Pro (two of them) are dual core Woodcrest and they outrun standard core2 processors... seriously :-)

I'm running on a Mac Pro with Vegas, (under XP) ProTools (XP and OSX), and have just bought FCP 4 from eBay to upgrade to FCP 5.1

Best of both worlds....

Newhope

I say go with a Mac, just to upset the PC diehards in here.

Even a diehard could begin changing his mind when reading posts and posts about people asking for a better titler, a new/revamped capture utility, 10 bit processing, compatibility with more cameras/hardware, export to other systems, etc... Sony has to wake up a little and adress these things people have been asking for years (in some cases) now...
And I'm not a "pro" editor for sure so imagine if I was.
The feeling I get ? Vegas doesn't evolve the speed it must be. The market may be going way to fast for it very soon.

Well said Futz.

Although I'm content with Vegas, it's easy to see why people are interested in FCP.

I'm considering a Mac with FCP. I'll install Vegas either via dual boot with Windows, or with PC emulation. One reason is for the industry compatibility, but also because the Mac OS is far, far, far, far, okay a million gazillion trillion miles ahead of the trash that is Windows (in any guise).

You might have gathered that I hate Windows.

The PC has always been a cobbled together mishmash of a machine and I am astounded that it ever became popular. Back when I had to give up my Atari Falcon Apple was going down the pan so I was forced to go with a PC (I swear an anogram for Piece of Crap) I'm technically minded and I get fed up of the problems and foibles with Windows and PC's in general. So I don't know how ordinary people who just want a machine that works get on. The Mac's OS is beautiful. A work of art. designed by people who know how to make user interfaces.

Get a Mac. You can still run Vegas on it. Generally people who don't like Macs have never used a modern one. A bit like people who don't like Ferrari's. usually because they are the ones who don't own one!

Macs are better and so are the people who drive hybrid cars.. .. . "thanks!" (reference South Park hybrid car episode)

This is a very easy choice. Mac is better but Windows has the software.

You mean like Ampede, the inexpensive ($99.00) NLE plug-in that provides continuous rasterization of vector graphics in PDF or Illustrator format on a frame by frame basis, so that each frame is always sharp no matter how much you zoom in?

You can even turn on subpixel rendering for maximum quality, which avoids artifacts when you want slow, smooth zooms.

Ooops. This plug-in is for Mac only. Never mind.

Perhaps you mean Keynote, how vastly better that is compared to Powerpoint? Drat, that's Mac too, what am I thinking, sorry.

Hmm, well, at least Windows has the BoomRecorder Pro location recording software that can record 64 channels of BWF audio up to 32-bit and 192 kHz on a laptop, with full camera LTC SMPTE/EBU timecode, metadata, pre-record buffer, XML sound reports, and spectrum analyzer, all for $240.00.
"Flags of Our Fathers", rave reviews on RAMPS, nyah-nyahh-umm, what's this Universal thing? Ooops, seems to be Mac also.

Btw, ProAppsTips is a great, very inexpensive, and quick way to quickly become proficient in the various parts of FCS.

two comments, FWIW:
1-I've used virtual windows on Sun platforms. If you're planning on using the PC emulator on a Mac, you can count on high resource overhead to run the emulator software.
2-Final Cut Pro is very very problemmatic with some HDV files. So much so that it is quite useless.

The Parallels Workstation software to run Windows virtually on OS X is in a different league from what the traditional vendors have mustered so far (they are scrambling to catch up, not 100% sure they will be able to anytime soon in this case).

Very high performance, very clean running [and now there is even Coherence mode that allows Windows apps to run as if they were OS X apps, with no Windows in sight.]

Since there are so many variations of the HDV specification, you can easily find HDV files that will not run on this or that NLE, whether it be Vegas, FCP, or Liquid. Buyer beware as always.

>>>Generally people who don't like Macs have never used a modern one.<<

Not true

YOU in the following paragraph is a generalisation, not directed at any single person here.

You hate windows, fine, but don't ry to convince those of us who are able to run windows without any problems whatsoever ( for years without crashes or viruses ) that it's all windows' fault and not yours.

Mac are for children, they are made by Apple and not much you can do about it. On the PC side there are many possibilities and infinite customizations one could do. So you have to know what you're doing. If that is too much for you, and can't handle all these options, buy a Mac and let uncle Steve do the thinking for you.

That about sums up the whole Mac vs PC thing.