The purpose, more questions, and explanations
What's the primary purpose of these machines? Are you proposing them for a multi-media lab, with the expectation that students will be using them for film and video production?
Alright, so everyone, rightfully so, seems to want to know exactly what these will be used for. In short, I'm not entirely sure. We are proposing for these iMacs as audio/visual expertise computers. We will be putting Cs4 Design Premium on them for mainly Web and Photo design.
The addition of iMovie, and potentially FCE, would be to add video editing capabilities for students wishing to make movies for whatever reason (potentially class work, although I stress that we only have one set of video editing classes as of now and they use Avid).
This brings me to another question which is seeing as we are trying to make these audio and visual editing machines, do you think we should put Aperture and/or Logic Express on these computers as well?
Like FCE above, we are not exactly sure to what extent these computers will primarily be used for, but the proposal must include everything we want at once (it must be a "one-time, lump-sum" proposal).
Another question we are mulling over is whether to ask for 4 or 10 iMacs (24"). We have 3200 students (60% business students (this includes marketing majors), but not as many hard-core video and audio editing-based majors. Bryant University, my school, gives every student a Lenovo T60 or T61 and there is no school-owned Mac on this campus. Part of my hopes with this proposal is to open the administration to the Mac world.
Finally, I'm wondering if we should go with the top model iMac (currently 3.06 GHz) or the other 24" model (currently 2.8 GHz). We will be waiting for the iMac refresh to purchase, so my question is: Should we get the top model or is the second tier model sufficient?
I know, really long post, I tried not to "block" it, but here is a run down of the questions and points I made and asked:
Answer to the purpose of machines:
- The propose of these computers will be to add an advanced alternative to video and audio editing for students, and potentially marketing materials or videos.
- iMovie, and potentially FCE will provide video-editing capabilities for the students.
Questions:
1) As visual and audio editing machines, should these computers come with Logic Express and/or Aperture?
2) Should I ask for 4 or 10 iMacs (for 3200 students)?
3) Should I ask for the top tier or second tier 24" iMac? We plan on buying them after the refresh, so if anyone knows if the processors would get a bump, that would be important.
I'd like to note that, although we can ask for whatever we want, I'd like to keep the cost down to what is absolutely important. Although all these programs are great, we need to keep the price down, so as to not scare off the committee. Also, the advantage to ordering 10 machines would be that all software would be looped under maintenance programs so they would be updating on every new software release for 3 years.
Thanks so much for your time and help,
Luke