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My company has give me 4,000 for a video edit machine, please advice

J

JohnWest

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 25, 2011
5
0
After months of fighting with old hardware finally my company has give me 4,000.00 to go and buy a machine for video editing. I shoot HD video with this machine
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/461818-REG/Sony_HVRV1U_HVR_V1U_HDV_Camcorder.html

which I then render and upload to the web, and in the future probably will work in dvds, and broadcasting.

Until now we have use PCs, and thankfully now we have the change to get a mac, but I have no idea what to get, so your advice will be great
 
JohnWest said:
After months of fighting with old hardware finally my company has give me 4,000.00 to go and buy a machine for video editing. I shoot HD video with this machine
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/461818-REG/Sony_HVRV1U_HVR_V1U_HDV_Camcorder.html

which I then render and upload to the web, and in the future probably will work in dvds, and broadcasting.

Until now we have use PCs, and thankfully now we have the change to get a mac, but I have no idea what to get, so your advice will be great
Click to expand...

laptop or desktop? And do you know what software you will be using? Also what are you editing/shooting? EX short films? music videos? etc....
 
If its only for use in the edit suite (not mobile), and you can see yourself wanting to render/compress large amounts of video with any sense of regularity, Id have to recommend a Mac Pro with Final Cut Studio.
 
Go with a Mac Pro, unless you need portability in which case go for the 17" or 15" Macbook pro depending on how portable it needs to be.
 
JohnWest said:
After months of fighting with old hardware finally my company has give me 4,000.00 to go and buy a machine for video editing. I shoot HD video with this machine
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/461818-REG/Sony_HVRV1U_HVR_V1U_HDV_Camcorder.html

which I then render and upload to the web, and in the future probably will work in dvds, and broadcasting.

Until now we have use PCs, and thankfully now we have the change to get a mac, but I have no idea what to get, so your advice will be great
Click to expand...

This is totally bass ackwards. If you guys have been using PCs, and you don't know anything about Macs, how in the world did you come to a $4000 budget? Don't say, "OH, that's how much the PC cost," because if they agreed with that logic then your company *at large* has no idea what it's doing. And, where are the software costs? Is that already accounted for? Since no one knows about Macs, how about the costs of supporting it two weeks later when everything goes awry?

Establishing a budget before knowing what's needed is a sure way to get it all wrong.
 
kustardking said:
This is totally bass ackwards. If you guys have been using PCs, and you don't know anything about Macs, how in the world did you come to a $4000 budget? Don't say, "OH, that's how much the PC cost," because if they agreed with that logic then your company *at large* has no idea what it's doing. And, where are the software costs? Is that already accounted for? Since no one knows about Macs, how about the costs of supporting it two weeks later when everything goes awry?

Establishing a budget before knowing what's needed is a sure way to get it all wrong.
Click to expand...

It might be all wrong, but sadly, with vicious Finance depts. scattered across every industry, fat too often its a "I dont care how you fit it in $4000, but your going to do it, otherwise you get nothing."
 
We need more information

Do you have a quality monitor available to you (IPS) with at least 1920 x 1080 res?
Have you ever used a Mac and Final Cut?

Final Cut Pro + a Pro monitor will cut your budget in half.
 
I'd say pick up a 27" iMac with the 2.93 GHz Core i7 (quad core with HyperThreading to present eight usable cores) and buy 16GB of RAM from Newegg (4GB DDR3 1333 SODIMMs from Crucial are $49 each) -- memory is very easy to install in iMacs (or was with the previous generation). That'll set you back $2400.

By comparison, a Mac Pro with eight cores and a 27" monitor costs $4498.

Unless you need internal file storage or have a $10k budget, get an iMac. Then you can pick up Final Cut Studio and a Drobo with Firewire 800 for additional storage later and still be under $4000.
 
hamean said:
Do you have a quality monitor available to you (IPS) with at least 1920 x 1080 res?
Have you ever used a Mac and Final Cut?

Final Cut Pro + a Pro monitor will cut your budget in half.
Click to expand...

This.

If you have a good monitor and software already, buy the Mac Pro.

If you don't, buy the iMac.
 
Gold89 said:
This.

If you have a good monitor and software already, buy the Mac Pro.

If you don't, buy the iMac.
Click to expand...

He might have a monitor, but as an all-PC shop, he almost certainly doesn't have Final Cut Studio or Final Cut Express.

While I would love the additional processing power of the Mac Pros I can't imagine trying to justify it on a $4000 budget. Final Cut slices $1000 off the budget, so he's got $3000 for a computer that starts at $2500. He literally cannot afford anything better than base configuration with 8GB of RAM. As a first Mac purchase at the company he might as well shoot himself in the foot. He can get twice the computer and a screen for less that base configuration of a Mac Pro. Maybe next time around he can convince them to drop $7500 on a Mac Pro, but it's not even a possibility on a $4k budget.

Get the iMac Core i7, buy 3rd party RAM, and use the second monitor for previews/whatever if you have it. The high-res 27" screen should make for a nice workspace when dealing with 1080 video.
 
No doubt, Mac Pro

Final Cut Pro is on the DO NOT BUY, UPGRADE coming soon list. Right now, it doesn't take proper advantage of all cores not does it take advantage of memory over 4GB (it is still 32 bit). Also, is AVID out of the question as it has been upgraded to 64 bit recently and is also an industry standard.

Get a Mac Pro. Allows you to do Blu-ray burning, add video cards, and other expansion possibilities such as SSD -- I'd advise setting up a 120GB SSD or higher as boot/applications drive). Again, something that isn't practical on an iMac.

Hard drive storage can be internal running at full SATA speeds rather than the 800 firewire interface. Cheaper, more practical and RAID too!

So anyone who is telling you to go for an iMac with that kind of budget is on drugs.

* Though you don't need that kind of horsepower for HDV. :D The iMac is fine. But if you upgrade to a 'true' HD editing such as a RED or even some of the D-SLRs in a year or two, you'll want the better, expandable system.


oculus42 said:
He might have a monitor, but as an all-PC shop, he almost certainly doesn't have Final Cut Studio or Final Cut Express.

While I would love the additional processing power of the Mac Pros I can't imagine trying to justify it on a $4000 budget. Final Cut slices $1000 off the budget, so he's got $3000 for a computer that starts at $2500. He literally cannot afford anything better than base configuration with 8GB of RAM. As a first Mac purchase at the company he might as well shoot himself in the foot. He can get twice the computer and a screen for less that base configuration of a Mac Pro. Maybe next time around he can convince them to drop $7500 on a Mac Pro, but it's not even a possibility on a $4k budget.

Get the iMac Core i7, buy 3rd party RAM, and use the second monitor for previews/whatever if you have it. The high-res 27" screen should make for a nice workspace when dealing with 1080 video.
Click to expand...
 
Sirmausalot said:
...
Allows you to do Blu-ray burning, add video cards, and other expansion possibilities such as SSD -- I'd advise setting up a 120GB SSD or higher as boot/applications drive). Again, something that isn't practical on an iMac.

Hard drive storage can be internal running at full SATA speeds rather than the 800 firewire interface. Cheaper, more practical and RAID too!

...

The iMac is fine.
Click to expand...

Blu-ray burning requires a separate burner purchase, just as it would on the iMac. No Mac offers Blu-ray natively.

SSD for your primary disk is not so useful if 90% of the time you are running one app that uses data from another disk. As an SSD user I can attest that it's great for boot times (Window 7 boots in 15 seconds on my 6-core system with an SSD at work) and for running the ten or more apps I always have open but doesn't help me with large files on other drives or processor intensive applications. It will do little for video editing if the video is not on the SSD. Biggest benefits would be the effects and transitions libraries loading more quickly. I'm not opposed, but the money is probably better spent elsewhere.

Video cards (and the option to buy a $30k powerhouse) are probably the biggest draw for the Mac Pro. I expect the next generation of Final Cut to make better use of OpenCL and GrandCentral to distribute workloads and the more powerful video card would be a Nice-to-Have. The eight [logical] cores of the iMac and the not-quite-as-powerful video card should make a pretty nice stand-in, though.

SATA II 3Gbps speeds would be preferable, but spinning disks aren't able to keep up with even SATA I 1.5Gbps speeds (most spinning disks top out at ~70MB/sec which is comfortably within FireWire 800's 100MB/sec theoretical and ~85MB/sec practical). RAID is the only way to beat that bottleneck, and even Software RAID would be better than a single spinning disk on any interface. The Hardware RAID card is probably out of reach for the $4k budget as it brings the base configuration to $3200 before you've added RAM or software. The Mac Pro absolutely wins out in the ability to have four internal disks in a RAID configuration, but the practical cost matters are another issue altogether.

Again, if he said a $7k budget, I wouldn't have blinked at suggesting the Mac Pro, but with just $4k and it being the company's first Mac, it's just not worth it to buy a low-end Mac Pro and keep saying, "If you'd given me more money..."
 
Mac Pro + Final Cut Pro
Or iMac (modified with eSATA)

kustardking said:
This is totally bass ackwards. If you guys have been using PCs, and you don't know anything about Macs, how in the world did you come to a $4000 budget? Don't say, "OH, that's how much the PC cost," because if they agreed with that logic then your company *at large* has no idea what it's doing. And, where are the software costs? Is that already accounted for? Since no one knows about Macs, how about the costs of supporting it two weeks later when everything goes awry?

Establishing a budget before knowing what's needed is a sure way to get it all wrong.
Click to expand...

FUD fail.

Cost of support? "When everything goes awry"? For a Mac. ROTF.

Apple provides 90 days free phone support (extendable to 3 years with Apple Care).
Apple store creatives can also help.

Gold89 said:
This.

If you have a good monitor and software already, buy the Mac Pro.

If you don't, buy the iMac.
Click to expand...

Yup. iMac can be modified with eSATA by OWC. So depends on if you plan on using a RAID.
 
just get a refurbished MacPro , because i guess you might have a monitor connected to your work pc already

and why software cost? if he's got a pc in the company he might have software for cutting and rendering already ..avid springs in mind and to get the mac version is simple a phonecall to avid away
 
Consultant said:
Mac Pro + Final Cut Pro
Or iMac (modified with eSATA)



FUD fail.

Cost of support? "When everything goes awry"? For a Mac. ROTF.

Apple provides 90 days free phone support (extendable to 3 years with Apple Care).
Apple store creatives can also help.
...
Click to expand...

You're funny - sweeping real world financial concerns under the rug like that means you're young and spoiled, and probably abusing your current situation with laziness, pride and a creeping awareness of self-importance. Your labeling of what are real concerns as "FUD" is your FINK (Fanboy Ignorance, Not Knowledge)

Users have problems no matter the platform. Software is buggy no matter the platform. I work with people who have known nothing but Macs forever and they are ever asking for help with what would seem within the grasp of common sense. I know PC users like that, too. That is, PEOPLE have PROBLEMS with technology, and with complex stuff like video editing, which rests on a lot of interdependent technology, you need to be AWARE that there will be down time. This costs time and, if you're the ONLY one with a SPECIAL engagement (a Mac in this case), it might cost you profile. Be prepared.

My point, which you are calling FUD, and in so doing are being a FINK, is simply that this kind of decision should be made rationally. A business expense should negotiate duties and budget. It is whack to start with a budget rather than the needs, nothing more and nothing less. If the budget is just a starting point, then great! But, that's not at all how it's presented. Note that I'm not saying the OP is himself in any way "wrong" - this is just an advisory. We don't know who planted the $4K stake. The original reply to my post, that this is the unfortunate truth for many shops, may make the most sense for discovery, but we don't know.

All that said, and assuming that there is no going back, I agree with the various suggestions around an iMac/++RAM/Final Cut/external drives - that should fit roughly in $4K. If things work out, perhaps there will be further funding.

Best of luck
 
the problem starts that the people who make the decision of a budget , have actually no idea about reality ,Mac's are great, Mac's are suitable for film cutting , but thats where the reality ends
even if the MacPro is there and the app final cut too and all is payed for ,but i guess nobody who made the budget has thought about someone coming from a windows PC wont be 100%productive the day he got a Mac , still takes a while to "think different" with a computer the op doesn't know much moreabout other then its existence and a operating system and software he is no familiar with
 
why buy Final Cut if he can just transfer a Premiere or Avid license to Mac?

what's wrong with what you've been using? a Windows workstation will be easier to support, and whoever you buy from (if you buy a workstation) will provide better customer service than Apple.
 
Hunt down a 2008 MacPro OctoCore and dump in as much RAM as you can, and then buy 4 7200RPM 1TB Drives and do some internal RAID magic. And then buy Adobe Premiere Pro + After Effects. Not sure how the retail $$ compares vs Final Cut Studio but, I'm sorry, FCP is NOT cutting it anymore, not at it's current version, not with the kind of hardware power you can harness. Apple has taken way too long to release the next version of that software; you'll be much happier using a production ready 64bit editor that uses 8 cores and all the RAM you can throw at it (Adobe) vs 2 core max rendering and 4GB RAM (FCP).

FYI, the Core i7 27" iMac is nearly as fast as the '08 MacPro Octo, but you'll get internal storage which will always be cheaper and faster than external. Sticking 4TB in a Drobo can cost a lot of money and be a LOT slower on accessing big HD Video files.
 
chrismacguy said:
It might be all wrong, but sadly, with vicious Finance depts. scattered across every industry, fat too often its a "I dont care how you fit it in $4000, but your going to do it, otherwise you get nothing."
Click to expand...

thank you for explaining my situation :)
 
thank you for all the responses,

The editing will be done at the office, so it does not need to be portable. the $4000 is only for hardware, the software will be the final cut pro studio, which has already being "budgeted for".

until now we have use adobe premier pro, we have decent but old pcs, etc. plent of food for discusion, however it is irrelevant. I have 4k to spend in a mac, if I dont use the money is gone, so I should have phrase my questions better. Please advice on a Mac video editing machine that I can purchase with 4k, and yes I will need a monitor also.
 
Last edited:
so it seems that the options are between

a Mac Pro and iMac

Mac Pro would be a better machine if I have a larger budget

iMac will be good because I can add third party memory

am I understanding this correcly?.

I see that the base price for a 27" 2.8GHz Core i5, 4GB, iMac, is 2k.

While a Mac Pro 2.8GHz QuadCore with 6GB with a 27Monitor is 3723.

Incidentaly can final cut pro, make use of more that 6GB or memory, or 8 cores (Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core ) Or is this just lots of power that the software will never endup using

thank you very much for your time and advice

The company produces instructional videos which are sold and viewed online, until now this videos were shot in SD cameras but now everything will be done with these cameras: http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-HVRV1U/
 
Last edited:
JohnWest said:
so it seems that the options are between

a Mac Pro and iMac

Mac Pro would be a better machine if I have a larger budget

iMac will be good because I can add third party memory

am I understanding this correcly?.

I see that the base price for a 27" 2.8GHz Core i5, 4GB, iMac, is 2k.

While a Mac Pro 2.8GHz QuadCore with 6GB with a 27Monitor is 3723.

Incidentaly can final cut pro, make use of more that 6GB or memory, or 8 cores (Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core ) Or is this just lots of power that the software will never endup using

thank you very much for your time and advice

The company produces instructional videos which are sold and viewed online, until now this videos were shot in SD cameras but now everything will be done with these cameras: http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-HVRV1U/
Click to expand...

Final Cut Pro uses only 4 gb I believe. You can upgrade the Mac Pro with 3rd party memory up to 32 gb, I don't think that'd be necessary though. Overall, the Mac Pro sounds like a better solution because of its expandability. Go with a refurbished Mac Pro too, they're basically like new and sometimes in BETTER condition than new ones because they're tested. You can buy a 3rd party monitor too, it doesn't have to be apple to be great ;). If you can, tell your company to wait and buy the next upcoming version of Final Cut Pro because it's supposed to use much more of the system resources.
 
Again, if it was me i would try to buy a new/refurb Mac Pro with a good amount of cores [at least a Quad], and the best video card apple sells.

The RAM, stick with the basic amount Apple sends. Then buy cheaper Apple 3rd party RAM. This will save you a lot of money.

Most videographers i know like to work with a two monitor setup. Maybe if you have any money left over this would be an option. BTW, this extra monitor would mostly be used for FCP's tool windows, or for edited playback.
 
thank you Sweetfeld28,

you mention to get the best video card apple sells, how does it help me to get the best one versus the one that comes with it ? Is the video going to be imported in higher quality? is FCP going to be able to render faster or more complex projects.

if final cut pro only uses 4GB memory, then why is that some suggest to get 8GB or even more ? how does it help my video editing experience.

thank you once again for your assistance
 
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