I Need Final Cuts Studio and Mac G5 Buying Tips and Advice.

[Michael Peele]

Would Apple be the best place to buy, or from a vendor?
The prices should all be about the same.
Which G5 is best? Dual or Quad?
Faster is always better…
I thought 2 500GB internal drives and 4GB of RAM would be OK to get started.
It will be fine. Keep your media on the secondary drive. You will get about 470GB which works out to about 36 hours of footage.
Should I buy the apple monitors or would others be better?
Apple monitors are pretty and match the G5. Plenty of other vendors make great screens as well. Try viewsonic or dell.
Any ideas on an external firewire drive?
LaCie D2 triple interface drives have worked well for us – anything with a FW800 should be good.

Mike Peele

[Walter Biscardi]

Have you searched this forum at all. This has been discussed quite a bit lately with all the new machines coming out and you’ll find a lot of threads on it.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“The Rough Cut,” an original short film premiering December 7th in full High Definition in Atlanta.
rsvp@biscardicreative.com to reserve seats.
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Richard Blakeslee]

Keven,

I made the change from Speed Razor a couple of years ago. It was a great system. Question: What are you doing with the old system? I have mine in storage but it takes up room. I can’t believe there’s a used market for the hardware or software. Maybe a donation?

Cheers, and welcome to FCP and the G5.

Richard

[Frank Pledge]

if you go with FW editing you want to keep your FW deck and your drive on a seperate bus. i’m not sure if the FW 400 port and the FW 800 port areon the same bus or not. if not – buy an additional fw800 pci card. (do these even exist for pci-express?) the new g5s have pci-express. this is new to mac.

btw – this includes more than one FW drive. meaning – if you have a huge huge project on more than 1 FW drive, it’s best to keep them on seperate bus as well.

speaking of drives – remember if you get 2 500 internals you should really only use the 2nd 500 for media. so if you think you’ll need a 500g system drive, go ahead – but you will not get more media space with it.

4g ram is more than enough.

in general – to edit dvcam you really only need to plug in the mac.if you go over dv to sd then everything changes.

search this forum or LAFCPUG for any other questions.

fp