MAC Mini an editor?

[Final Design Studios]

To tell the honest truth, I'm a PC guy. Its just what I've been raised on. But this new MAC mini looks to be quite interesting.

I was wondering what you guys thought about the power of this thing for editing. How do you think it would perform at its maxed out specs for editing?

Maxed out runs up a till of about $1,000....is it worth it?

[pptphoto]

Of course its worth it. Its a Mac. If you max out the RAM, get the bigger hard drive, and have the SuperDrive put in, it should work fine. Its pretty similar specs to the G4 PowerBooks, for alot less. Lots of people edit on PowerBooks. The only issue is the video card, but thats not much of a problem unless you are planning to do lots of work with Motion. Video cards are not replaceable in PowerBooks either, so its still a similar situation. The new OS should be out by June, and thats going to be incredible. Check it out at Apple.com. I'm assuming you already have a keyboard and monitor you can use. Good luck.

[Loki]

The mac mini will be a fine editing machine for DV video..

but it ain't no G5. It will be as previously stated, similar to working on a Powerbook, although the powerbooks have slightly different architectures... with regards to ram types, HD speeds..etc..

but the performance won't be that drastically different. The main thing is to use a an external FireWire drive as your scratch/capture disk... the speed of the HD's in the mac mini are either 4200RPM or 5400RPM one of those.. so not exactly the speediest drives.

A maxed out mac mini will perform great for DV editing, well worth it if you have the money and want to take the plunge into the mac world.

cheers.

[CodyBrown]

For under $1000 you can get:

1.25GHz PowerPC G4
256MB DDR333 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB DDR video memory
40GB Ultra ATA hard drive
500GB External Lacie Drive
Combo drive
DVI or VGA video output

That's more than a half terabyte of storage.

Try building that system two years ago and it would be labeled as an incredibly professional setup once you ad the monitor and everything.

A ton of storage and decent processor = great Final Cut Pro Setup.

-cody

[Final Design Studios]

But the 256mb ram seems to be REALLY low?

[amoildani]

max the ram, 256mb IS too low on mac, other than that and the graphics card, its a pretty good system

[J_Barnes]

Yeah, I'm seriously looking at this. Unfortunatly, the government pays me to be a professional editor...which means that I'm editing on Wintel based systems. My FCP skills are severely atrophied at this point, so it would be nice to have a tiny editor for home projects.

The only thing stopping me is that I'm arguing between this and an iBook for portability.

[TimurCivan]

ooo whats a wintel system?

[J_Barnes]

It's a fun little box that facilitates the slow mutation of software until it eventually exhausts and destroys the system.

Kinda like a petri dish for programming code.

[reservoir]

The Mac Mini is great *little* machine for editing DV. However it WILL NOT run Apple Motion. This software requires a minimum 64-meg Nvidia / ATI card. Final Cut Pro, Avid, DVD Studio Pro, etc. all work fine. I've tested them myself. I was seriously thinking about the Mac Mini as an editing machine but decided to go ahead and get the G5. Twice as much I know....but it's a Dual G5 that will run everything you need it to and it is fully upgradable and not limited in any way like a powerbook or mac mini would be. ~reservoir~

[speedbump]

My camera man is using a G4 tower w/ 1 gig ram and 60GB software RAID, FCP Pro, and he is happy with the machine. In fact, he is considering using his 2.6 Gig Intel box with Premiere Pro chiefly as a gaming machine, and doing all his editing on his G4.

So, I guess if you max out the RAM, get a big, fast firewire drive, you will have an adequate editing box. It ain't no dual G5, but then again you get what you pay for.

And it runs Unix under the hood baby! That's a lot of avoidance of hassles. Good luck there.