Help with a Mac purchase

Z

Zachdank

Member
I just got my HVX200 a couple weeks ago. I am looking to purchase a Mac pro to edit with.
My question is, can i get a decent set up for $2500?
If anyone could help me with configuring this, i would be very thankful. I have never owned a Mac before.
 
Yeah I think so. You can get a nice macbook pro or a base model mac pro for that price(before tax and the service plan). You can also get a loaded Imac. The new ones are pretty damn good systems for the price.
 
tony240sx said:
Yeah I think so. You can get a nice macbook pro or a base model mac pro for that price(before tax and the service plan). You can also get a loaded Imac. The new ones are pretty damn good systems for the price.
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Would i be better off going with a base model Mac pro, or a loaded I-mac?
 
I love macs and 90% of the time recomend them.. but I hear that the P2 importing with macs is slow and cumbersome. You might want to do some research here and elsewhere. You might want to think about PC or at least check into Avid for Apple. I would guess a decent PC laptop that can acutally LOAD AND READ the P2 cards and offload them to a USB/firewire drive in the field or back at the car would be worth looking at.
 
Buy a used Powerbook. It has the built in PCMCIA slot so you can put the P2 Card right into your Mac. And you can run FCP. That with an Imac at home would be a cheap field/home workstation workflow.

-Noah
 
NoahK said:
Buy a used Powerbook. It has the built in PCMCIA slot so you can put the P2 Card right into your Mac. And you can run FCP. That with an Imac at home would be a cheap field/home workstation workflow.

-Noah
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Where is a good place to find one used?
 
NoahK said:
Buy a used Powerbook. It has the built in PCMCIA slot so you can put the P2 Card right into your Mac. And you can run FCP. That with an Imac at home would be a cheap field/home workstation workflow.

-Noah
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Noah,

Does that mean the new MacBook Pros don't have the PCMCIA slot?
 
you would deffinitly be better off with a refurbished 24inch new imac with 4gb ram and if possible an accademic version of fcp2 then down the road buy a few hard drives and your set. That should come out to about 2500 if your lucky. Remember make sure u buy the ram from www.owcmacsales.com it will save you a fortune.
 
i found frustration using Imac or a Powerbook and finally bought a MacPro Quad 2.66 which runs like a Ferrari, even with HD. I got the unit, added a 500G Hard Drive and 3 extra gigs of Ram and was out the door for about 2900. Melrose Mac. LA or Burbank. Running Studio-2.
 
i bought a mac pro last month and it's awesome. i know other ones are coming out at macworld but i learned my lesson with my powerbook - it arrived on the day of a very big apple keynote, so the first thing I did was open it up, listen to the keynote and hear Jobs talk about how every thing was switching to Intel and how much faster it was gonna be. The machine was obsolete not even 20 minutes after I opened it, but I just had to let it go.

If you want one now, buy one. I've got FCP on my mac pro and it's quick, plus the option for 2 monitors is really nice... i got super spoiled on my powerbook with a 19" lcd as the 2nd screen. now i'm back to just one monitor and can't wait to get a 2nd. Plus the mac pro is far more upgradeable and a better workstation for crunching data files, compressing video files and multitasking if you're in to that sort of stuff. Sometimes I wind up running protools & FCP side by side and it's nice to so quickly go between them.
 
I don't plan on using it for anything but capture, logging and maybe some dailies. I have a G5 with 2 displays at home. This would be for the field.
 
no discount for FCP, though there's a discount for final cut express, and it's cheaper to upgrade to final cut pro. not sure if there's a discount overall.

the macbook pros don't have PCMCIA slots so you'd have to buy a Duel Adapter which is like $100 or $200 and that'll take P2 cards for quick download.

i still use my powerbook in the field, as long as i shoot 720p i can even play it on the machine, but generally it's just to offload the cards for later.
 
mrWr0ng said:
no discount for FCP, though there's a discount for final cut express, and it's cheaper to upgrade to final cut pro. not sure if there's a discount overall.

the macbook pros don't have PCMCIA slots so you'd have to buy a Duel Adapter which is like $100 or $200 and that'll take P2 cards for quick download.

i still use my powerbook in the field, as long as i shoot 720p i can even play it on the machine, but generally it's just to offload the cards for later.
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I thought Final Cut Express didn't work with P2 for some reason. Is this correct?
 
probably not. but if you own final cut express, you can upgrade it to final cut pro for less than the cost of FCP on its own.
 
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