new computer

[Ben Holmes]

Note to admins – Probably need a buyers guide for all these switchers!

Let people know where you are and they can recommend their favourite resellers – but for HDV most people would probably recommend you pick up a new Mac Pro from the Apple Store – the Mac Pros seem good value, and you will only need to buy a couple of harddrives for internal storage, more Ram (Apple’s is expensive – I use crucial.com) and a copy of FCP.

FCP ships as part of Final Cut Studio that contains Motion, for creating motion gfx and text. FCP itself has a basic text generator that does static, crawl, typewriter etc and basic 3d text (non-extruded). If you want to make use of Motion, I would recommend upgrading the graphics card on the standard Apple Mac Pro spec to the ATI X1900 – but it might give you a few weeks wait. Otherwise, buy the computer with the stock gfx card (fine for fcp + one dual-link monitor) and buy the X1900 seperately and fit it when it’s available – it won’t cost you any more that way.

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.

Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com

[Rennie Klymyk]

Unless you’re getting a really good deal, the dual 2 gig unfortunately has the older PCI-X slots which have been replaced by PCI-E slots on the last 2 generations of macs. The nicest option cards already don’t work with these older machines so the as far as an inverstment for the future I’d go for the newer quads or intels.

“everything is broken”

[David Roth weiss]

In fact, many 2gb Power Macs actually didn’t even come with PCI-X slots, they came with plain vanilla PCI slots making even more worthless as FCP platforms.

[John Culleton]

thanks all, the Mac pro with Xeons looks good, will the Intel chips let me run PC programs then?

[Jeff Carpenter]

You can run Windows programs but you have to buy a copy of Windows.

Once you do that, you have to ways to run it.

One way is to buy a program called Parallels:

https://www.parallels.com

It lets you run Windows inside of OS X. That’s simple and easy, but you’re splitting computer resources…it won’t run as fast.

The alternative is to get Apple’s boot camp:

https://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

That’s free AND it runs Windows at full speed on the hardware. The one downside is you have to re-start the computer…you can only run one OS at a time that way. Going back and forth between OS X and Windows takes a minute and you have to shut down all your programs.

I use Boot Camp because I use it for some processor-intensive Windows programs and I want the full speed.

If I was running simpler programs I would have gone with Parallels. Not having to re-start is pretty cool.

[John Culleton]

thanks Jeff, i’d really miss some Windows stuff so a reboot would be well worth it, i’ll be back for some tips….