Foo - PC or Mac for Video editing

Which is better for video editing.

Can an entry level Mac do much better than an entry level PC.

What Mac would you buy purely to be used for editing purposes and why?

Buy the most expensive, fastest multi processor mac you can afford, with a huge amount of memory. I have friends that do this sort of thing professionally. It all comes down to rendering time. One guy that I know switched from PC to a quad core mac (I don't know which PC he was using) and cut his rendering times in half.

I do pro audio, and most of us are using macs. Again, the big expensive ones are king, because signal processing takes powerful computers, especially with a lot of tracks. Since I am not running a studio anymore I just limit myself to mastering small projects at home, and therefore have no desire to get a new high-buck machine. Mine is a dual G4 from 2003. It was the bees knees back then. Nowadays it bogs down if I do more than about 10 tracks at 96kHz with signal processing.

Entry level Macs will run circles around any entry or intermediate level PC for video stuff.

I would avoid the new aluminum Macbook for video editing because it has no FireWire. The Macbook Pro has FireWire, so if you need portable video editing, you will need to pay the price difference.

Desktop iMacs, I am pretty sure, can handle your video editing needs, but I would recommend maxing their RAM out. A Mac Pro can easily handle any video jobs you can throw at it, for the most part.

The computer isn't as important as the software you're using. There's nothing on the PC that comes close to iMovie for ease of use for beginners. And FinalCutPro will do pro-level editing. Ultimately though, nothing beats Adobe Premiere for NLE. You can start with basic free stuff that comes with the camera, but over the years, you'll find yourself upgrading to more sophisticated software that will end at Premiere. It has extensible architecture that allows 3rd-party plug-ins for additional functionality that nothing else can touch. After Effects and BorisFX alone are worth it. Along with tonnes of other feature-packed free plug-ins: http://www.thepluginsite.com/resources/freepm.htm

As for equipment, while CPU-power is needed for rendering, but that's only a small portion of it. You'll want at least 16gb memory and a 64-bit OS to manage it. I've got 64gb on a dual quad-core machine and still need to double that memory and am installing a 2nd server for 4-CPU/16-core rendering.

Dealing with 100gb files requires some serious HP on the storage end. You'll want an array that can manage at least 200MB/s sustained throughput or else you'll spend most of your time twiddling your thumbs. I'm setting up an EVA5000 now with twin FC-HBAs to get at least 800-900MB/s. And even then, that's still not fast enough.

But really, it comes down to the kind of videos you want to edit and the final-products you want to create. Home-movie clips for YouTube can be done with anything. But if you want HD-DVD, broadcast-quality stuff, you'll want the requirements I outlined above.

Home-movie clips for YouTube can be done with anything.

Troof. Did this with iMovie '08 and a Canon point-n-shoot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnJJCfQD6BY

I think the folks at Avid might give Adobe a run for their money, especially considering that they have dominated the market for so long.

But really, it comes down to the kind of videos you want to edit and the final-products you want to create.

Bingo. Figure out exactly what you want to do, and then the hardware and software requirements will be less nebulous.

http://img392.imageshack.us/img392/4931/toaster20007bignf5.jpg

wow blast from the distant past. video toaster.

I found an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster card at Goodwill for $20 once. Didn't buy it, but found out later that they were selling for over a thousand bucks on eBay at the time. Apply swift kick to own ass, lather, repeat.

So it would appear on this I need a mac with more memory than I could really afford to do some editing.

I have a three year old PC (P4HT), $49 software, 1.5GB RAM, and I create, edit, and burn my movies perfectly fine... of course it takes 2 hours to render a 90-minute movie, but I have a life away from the computer so I just let it run and I don't even notice it...

What software do you use?

So it would appear on this I need a mac with more memory than I could really afford to do some editing.

How much do you think you need?

So it would appear on this I need a mac with more memory than I could really afford to do some editing.Well... .what kind of final-product do you want to create?

There's a balance of sorts between cost, convenience and speed. Hands-down the easiest to use is iMovie on a Mac. The cheapest is an old P4 Windows machine using Avid's FreeDV or VirtualDub. These are more difficult to use, may take you 2-3x as long to edit and compose a movie. Finally, there's the last step of rendering the final-output and creating a DVD disk-image. Basic Mac will do it at 2x real-time speed, or about 30-minutes for a 1-hour movie. High-end Mac will do it 5-6x speed, or about 10-minutes for a 1-hour movie.

So if you've got time to learn and time to wait for the final-output, you can create something just as nice on a basic PC or Mac compared to top-end machines. It just takes longer that's all. Heck, I remember the first DVD I made 9-years ago on a Powermac G3, it took about 3-days to render. :( Now that I've got fast-array with rendering spread out between 6 machines, it takes less than 5-minutes. :)

So from my reading of everything a basic mac would work much better than a pc, totally fine with 2x real-time speed.
So was wondering an Mac with Imovie costs what? anybody know how much it would cost, I no nothing about Macs.

What software do you use?
I am using Vegas Movie Studio 9 and I love it! It can be as super simple or as super complicated as you want to make it.

So from my reading of everything a basic mac would work much better than a pc, totally fine with 2x real-time speed.
So was wondering an Mac with Imovie costs what? anybody know how much it would cost, I no nothing about Macs.Personally, I prefer to pick up 1-2 year-old previous-generation stuff used to save 40-60% on the purchase price. About $600-750 will get you an 20" iMac with Core2duo CPU along with a bunch of bundled software, including the iMovie. Comes with firewire-port and DL DVD-burner. Add $50 to max out the memory @ 4gb and you're set to go.

However, you may want to get your feet wet right away if you've got a PC. Here's a workflow that's pretty typical:

1. download footage from camera to PC. Best to download raw DV video through firewire port with no codec-conversions or compression to get highest-quality source material. WinDV (http://windv.mourek.cz/) is a good package to download from the camera. It also lets you upload raw DV video back up to the camera. Before external hard-drives were cheap and large enough, I would upload the finished video back to the camera to send a miniDV tape to the DVD-mastering shop (about 25gb per tape).

2. edit video. MS Movie Maker (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx) is a basic free package built into WinXP.

3. transcode video into final format. MPEG2 for DVDs, FLV for compact online-videos. Divx-AVI/WMV/MP4 for playing on computer/iPods. VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) or SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html) are great packages for high-quality transcoding. While there are all-in-one packages that let you convert video and author a DVD, the quality is nowhere as good as these two converters.

4. author/master DVD to create menus and chapter options. Music & animated icons, etc. DVD Author Pro (http://www.download.com/DVD-Author-Pro/3000-7970_4-10432050.html) lets you create a very professional DVD. Makes a master ISO image at the end that you can preview.

5. finally, burn the ISO image to a DVD using ImgBurn (http://www.imgburn.com/) and that's it! :)

Personally, I prefer to pick up 1-2 year-old previous-generation stuff used to save 40-60% on the purchase price. About $600-750 will get you an 20" iMac with Core2duo CPU along with a bunch of bundled software, including the iMovie. Comes with firewire-port and DL DVD-burner. Add $50 to max out the memory @ 4gb and you're set to go.




So other than Ebay which can be a bit hooky on computers, where would you recommend looking for a
2nd hand Imac?

I would assume that a 2 year old Imac would be a lot better quality than a 2 year old pc.

Or, with a Mac:


1. download footage from camera to PC.

2. edit video and transcode into final format with iMovie.

3. Author and burn DVD in iDVD.

Or,

3. Upload video to Youtube or your me.com gallery straight from iMovie, along with adding it to iTunes to be playable on an iPod -- still from iMovie.

;) :thumb:

OP, what is the end goal for your project? that might help us understand what level of system and program you need.

So other than Ebay which can be a bit hooky on computers, where would you recommend looking for a
2nd hand Imac?

I would assume that a 2 year old Imac would be a lot better quality than a 2 year old pc.

you can get them as refurbs from apple.com's special deals section of their online store. The iMac isn't necessarily better than a PC, it would completely depend on the PC's starting quality since it could be more easily upgraded. The iMac not so much.

I use a MacBook Pro; it was a refurb, but it came with the same warranty the new ones came with. It has been perfect for me and FC Pro runs just fine on the 2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM. The iMac, if I remember correctly, of the same era would have similar components and should work fine for most situations.

If you just want to make home movies and whatnot, iMovie would come with the computer and would carry you for quite a while before you outgrow it. You can get similar products for the PC world as well, so really, unless you need a lot of horsepower to do large, hi-res files and intend to run a big 'ol RAID to store video on (in which case you likely wouldn't be asking these questions in the first place), it would really come down to your preference for an OS.

OP, what is the end goal for your project? that might help us understand what level of system and program you need.

If I knew what the wife actually wanted it may help:lol:

She has approx 500 video tapes from over the years most only have 45 mins of footage that she actually wants on them, she wants to edit them and put them on dvd.

Also she wants to make family video's with photographs to music, picture change on the beat count etc.

Last time she made one of those was when she was in college and she was using analog and using a professional avid system.

I managed with our getting olderby the minute pc to edit some dvd's (Super 8 conversions), to make a 60 minute dvd to give to family members took me weeks to get it right and about 24 hours to render. All I did was basically input in the clips I wanted and string them together, editing was nigh on impossible.

I have heard over the years that macs are great for video, graphics etc, which is why I asked the question, does that help or I have I just muddied the waters.

A mac with typical OS-X software can do a good job of basic video editing, and iMovie HD, iDvd can make some good DVD's. iphoto can do a nice slideshow to-fit-to-music length, depending on how many pictures. A new MAC (Leopard) will come with bootcamp allowing for the installation of Windows, thus allowing you the best of both worlds.


The iWhatever applications all blend nicely with one another.
Any transitional effect does need to be rendered frame by frame, so there is no easy/fast DVD solution.
When the software is controlling it it's easy but when it's time to render to DVD ....no matter how you slice it it's going to take a while.

A multi-processor G5 max'd out in RAM, and HD with external drives, with a superDrive is your best bet, not taking budget into consideration. Video workstations need as much RAM as you can put in it.

A multi-processor G5 max'd out in RAM, and HD with external drives, with a superDrive is your best bet, not taking budget into consideration. Video workstations need as much RAM as you can put in it.
So other than Ebay which can be a bit hooky on computers, where would you recommend looking for a
2nd hand Imac?

I would assume that a 2 year old Imac would be a lot better quality than a 2 year old pc.Well, it depends upon the particular configuration. Apple gets first dibs on Intels latest and fastest CPUs. So for about 6-months when the Core2duo came out, only the Macs had the fastest 3ghz dual and quad-core versions. However, if you compared a PC and Mac 6-months later, they'll be similar. Also keep in mind the faster depreciation-rate of a PC, so buying a used PC may get you better specs than a similar Mac. Unless you're talking about the top-of-the-line dual quad-core Xeon machines, where the MacPro tends to be cheaper regardless of age.

Anyway, check out Craigslist (http://charlotte.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=mac) and your local classifieds for used Macs. That way you can check it out for a test-drive before purchasing. The used G5 machines are the best bang for the buck. They fall somewhere in between the P4 and Core2duo in performance.

If your wife has used Avid, then she'll have no problem learning Premiere. A simple way to digitize old tapes is to run them through a video-camera with Firewire pass-through. Run the tapes on the old VCR, send output to the RCA-analogue input of the video-camera. Then the camera's Firewire-output sends the digitized video to the computers' Firewire-input. Pretty much all Sony cameras with Firewire has this pass-through feature. Check the specs.

Then, with all of that video to go through (if she ever really gets through it all; my mom certainly has more footage than she'll ever use), you'll either want to edit to "final production" in a hurry or get a lot of HD space for storage.

Or both.

Looks like an sometime next year an Imac will be the latest addition to the household :)

Was wondering further on this what do people think of the Mini-Mac?

NOTE: I edited the subject to better reflect the question. PM me if you want it changed back.

For video editing, Macs are better (to a degree) because they naturally support color profiles better, and the tools available to it are better, on average, than their Windows counterparts. The Mac Mini is fine for basic video editing, but I would be wary of getting it for more sophisticated work (HD editing, for example). The elements that you want to watch for are the CPU (it should be fast) and the graphics card (it should NOT be integrated, which it is on the Mini, and it should be fast and have an ample amount of memory).

Let me try and word this another way, nothing edited is HD, largest edit is an 8 hr video tape (down to about 5 hours).

Wife wants to try Imovie never used a mac in our life's believe better to spend money $800 on mini mac, before she goes out and spends $2200 on an Imac that she likes the look off.

From reading various things online believe that mini mac will work fine for her current needs, if she really likes it a few years down the line she can then but the bigger mac for better/faster editing.

Your thoughts?

Try a used iMac off of eBay or Craig's List.

Let me try and word this another way, nothing edited is HD, largest edit is an 8 hr video tape (down to about 5 hours).

Wife wants to try Imovie never used a mac in our life's believe better to spend money $800 on mini mac, before she goes out and spends $2200 on an Imac that she likes the look off.

From reading various things online believe that mini mac will work fine for her current needs, if she really likes it a few years down the line she can then but the bigger mac for better/faster editing.

Your thoughts?

If you are in a reasonably dense area, you can buy a Mac mini on Craigslist for less than $400. Alternatively, you can try eBay and see what you come up with. You might be able to find a more appropriate iMac on there as well (look for the Intel versions; the PowerPC ones are slower).

Finally, you can try the Apple Store, as their refurbished equipment is well priced. In fact, if you want to consider a mobile alternative, a Macbook is a good solution for your needs, and will cost less than $1000.

Hope this helps.

Try a used iMac off of eBay or Craig's List.

Nothing decent been here on craiglist for a while, to many crooks on Ebay for me to part with the money.

So it sounds like I should buy a macbook rather than a mini mac

Something that has at least a Core 2 Duo and can take at least 4 gigs of RAM will do. So basically, a MacBook or an iMac.

And depending upon how serious you want to get into video-editing, I'd recommend 16gb+ of RAM. It really saves time. Video-card won't make much of a difference unless you're playing games. NTSC frame-rate is 29.97fps and pretty much any graphics-card can do that at full-frame.

16 gigs of RAM?? How big of files are you working with!?!?!?

SD-DV video is 12gb/hr in raw captured video. HDV is 90-400gb/hr for raw video. A DVD video project usually takes up 800-1500gb of disc space. Each segment might be 100-300gb each. The more of this you can cache into RAM, the faster your production will be. It proves scrolling speed through the footage, it improves preview and rendering times.

I just picked up a new machine with 4 quad-core CPUs with 64gb RAM. For video-production, it's about 4x faster than my dual-quad-core MacPro clone with 16gb RAM, which is about 4x faster than my Core2duo machine with 4gb.

woah. I didn't realize that those files were so big.

Welcome to the world of digital media. Last year I bought a LaCie 500G external on sale for 120$. Now it's almost full and I can get a 1T drive for about the same price, although there are 4T consumer drives out there now. Nothing is big enough to back anything up on anymore , it's all duplicate drives. Holograhic storage needs to hurry up, we need long term digital archiving.

So one more video question, what devices would mac users reccommend for transferring old vhs tapes to a mac.

Currently have an old ads tech device that uses USB, should I look to buying a betetr device that uses firewire, if so what device?

So one more video question, what devices would mac users reccommend for transferring old vhs tapes to a mac.

Currently have an old ads tech device that uses USB, should I look to buying a betetr device that uses firewire, if so what device?

Does it still work? No reason to buy another peripheral if the one you've got works fine. VHS is such a low-fidelity medium these days that I wouldn't worry about USB vs. FW.

If not, I'd try something like Elgato's EyeTV (http://elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products.en.html) or any other such device.

Which is better for video editing.

Can an entry level Mac do much better than an entry level PC.

What Mac would you buy purely to be used for editing purposes and why?

if you're asking, then you're not a pro. answer is: apple.

thread closed.

Thank you Botto for your usual helpful words of wisdom.

Thank you Botto for your usual helpful words of wisdom.

pleasure.

So one more video question, what devices would mac users reccommend for transferring old vhs tapes to a mac.

Currently have an old ads tech device that uses USB, should I look to buying a betetr device that uses firewire, if so what device?If you've got one already, it should be fine. NTSC signal is about 500 lines of resolution, but interlaced to only need 250 lines per frame (unfortunately, VHS is even lower quality than this). So it's very low bandwidth. While there are higher-end capture devices that does de-interlacing and noise-reduction, you can do the same through software afterwards. The difference in quality is noticeable since you've got a better initial capture, but it's really not worth the cost for home videos.

But if you want every bit of quality possible, especially with old worn-out tapes, go for one of these: Canopus ADVC300 (http://digitalcontentproducer.com/videoencodvd/revfeat/video_canopus_advc/).
Or get the Edirol VMC-1 (http://www.edirol.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=86) which can do real-time orrections in 4:2:2 colour-space.

When I have used the current ads tech device in the past I always seem to get a line at the bottom of the screen, any ideas what causes that?

Also is that likely to happen with the Imac or can Imovie fix that?

If the line is at the very bottom, you can just crop the image slightly and get rid of it. Otherwise, you can use AfterEffects in Premiere to copy the scan-line right above or below and duplicate it on top of the offending one.