iMac?

[Jeff Carpenter]

The downsides:

1) Firewire 800 drives are the fastest external drive you can get.
2) No capture cards means firewire input of video only
3) No live monitoring of video other than over firewire
4) Video card not going to be good for Motion

That said, IF you’re sticking with DV or HDV and IF you’re not using Motion much, well they’re pretty neat machines that you can get a lot of work done with. They’re super-snappy while editing those formats.

I use one of the first Core 1 Duo Intel iMacs for editing and it works great. The thing is, though, that it’s sitting next to a Mac Pro station. I use the iMac for getting work done while the main computer is capturing/compressing/burning. So as a 2nd computer, it’s fantastic. None of the downsides apply to me because I have all that on my main system. I would highly suggest an iMac as a second system should you need one.

But as a primary system, well, it will do fine for a lot of things but it’s not ideal.

[Marco Solorio]

We have a white 20″ iMac for invoicing and such at the facility (it’s not used for any creative/production work). I have to say I’ve always liked that computer, at least for that type of low-end CPU work. The new silver and black looks awesome IMO. Very sexy. Will it replace our white one? Probably not, but if I had to get a new iMac, I’d totally get one. Very slick!

Marco Solorio | CreativeCow Host | OneRiver Media | Codec Resource Site | Cinesoft | Media Batch

[13]

The biggest problem is there is only one firewire bus (yes multiple ports 400 & 800 but they share the same bus) and no other drive expansion options.

I remember a couple of years back I had a boss that would only let me cut on a Power book G4 with out an expiation card. Same situation only one firewire bus. I was only working in DV but I would often get dropped frames while running it back to tape. Having to communicate with drives and send video In/Out can sometimes overload the one bus. And of course it always happened right near the end so I had to to the entire thing over. Talk about a wast of time.

If the iMac had an expansion slot then I would consider it, at least then you can add another firewire bus with a card or better yet add a eSata card. But with out an expansion slot on it I would never consider an iMac as a serious editing machine.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Chris Poisson] “With an iO of some type and an external RAID though, who knows? Anybody use these?”

As long as a FW800 RAID is fast enough for what you’re doing, you’ll be fine. Just bear in mind that a desktop with multiple processors will always render faster than a laptop or iMac. If you do a lot of rendering, especially intensive effect rendering, this should be a consideration.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Alexander Gao]

You don’t think the Radeon HD 2600 pro w/ 256MB gfx mem will be sufficient to run Motion? That card is pretty beefy… I know it won’t come close to the real-time and GPU rendering of a 512MB Quadro FX in a Mac Pro, but won’t it at least be good? Do you think the Macbook Pro’s 256MB nVidia 8600M GT will not be good for motion? I haven’t ever used Motion before, but as a heavy After Effects user, the 128MB Radeon 9600 in my iMac G5 was certainly capable albeit quite poky on complex comps.

Thanks,
Alexander Gao
USC School of Cinematic Arts
John C. Hench D.A.D.A.

[Zak Mussig]

The new iMac also has gigabit ethernet, and iSCSI is becoming a pretty viable storage solution… shared no less. I think with a good iSCSI storage solution and a gigabit network, the new iMac is a great machine for the educational market or low to middle-end post environments. I won’t be tossing out my Mac Pro, but I may get one for the house and actually do projects at home again. I’ve only had a Powerbook G4 at home for about a year now.

While I’m posting… I’ve been away on vacation (got married), so I haven’t been on the forum in a bit. I’m super impressed with the snazzy new navigation, so props to somebody.

Zak