I am a teacher and we are starting a video productions class where I will have a small group of kids that will film and edit video to develop daily announcements for our school. When meeting with my principal today he asked what I needed to get the class up and running. I have a kid who is great a video editing on mac's with FCE and I have used a mac for video editing via imovie. But today I was told to buy the best computer for our needs and make things easy on us. My boss told me to ask the kid what kind of computer he would like and we would buy him one. When I went to ask him he wanted a mac pro. Aren't the newer updated 27 inch imac's scoring better on the benchmarks? What advantage are we getting by getting a mac pro vs. an imac? I had thought about getting a 27 inch i7 imac and then getting another mac mini that way I had two computers that kids could edit and work on at the same time. We have two very nice canon hd camcorders as well as most of the mics and stuff to produce decent high school video content that we will publish to the web, what other item am I going to need to do this? I though I would want some external storage. I currently use a 15 macbook pro 2.53 to do our football editing but like I said that is all via imovie how much faster will a mac pro be vs. an i7 imac? I was looking at a 2x 2.26 quad core mac pro with 8 GB ram vs the 2.8 i7 imac with 8 GB ram. Only thing that would differ between the two would be the HD since I don't want to spend all of our schools money incase I need something else and need to ask for it at the last moment. I can't wait too long for a refresh of mac pro or imacs as we have to purchase by the end of the month to spend money from last years budget, so any help you can give me would be great.
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- Thread starter Bombercoach
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FCP ain't multicore so get the iMac. Do you already have displays? If so, get one iMac and couple Minis so there is one work horse and couple secondary machines so others can learn too, it's very boring to watch one guy editing and getting all attention all the time and that's not the way to learn. iMovie is very easy so I'm sure the others will get a hold on it very quickly
3 iMacs instead of a Mac Pro
The price of a cheapest Mac Pro + Display = $3,398.
The price of 3 iMac (cheapest configuration) = $3,597
I have worked with Final Cut Studio in an iMac (non-Intel) and currently I'm working in a MacBookPro (2009) without any problem of performance.
Instead of Final Cut Studio can be iMovie that comes free.
The price of a cheapest Mac Pro + Display = $3,398.
The price of 3 iMac (cheapest configuration) = $3,597
I have worked with Final Cut Studio in an iMac (non-Intel) and currently I'm working in a MacBookPro (2009) without any problem of performance.
Instead of Final Cut Studio can be iMovie that comes free.