Hi, I'm the technician for the media department at a 6th form college, and I'm looking for advice on how to spend our £40,000 cash injection. (I've gauged about 20k for NLE steup)

As exciting as that is, it's the most responsibility I've had in this position, and I wan't all the advice I can get. It's a pretty small space here, and we currently have 3 edit stations running Premiere Pro 1.5
The new setup doesn't need to be cutting edge, the students are 14-18 years old, and mostly new to NLE; I need to build a setup that will make the most of their potential to improve skills with video, but overdoing it (All Avid for example, or after effects) I think would never be really taken advantage of and would just be a waste of money.

The objectives I've laid myself out are:
(Students need to be able to capture DV video, edit, and output to various formats)

• Will be easy to use
• Will allow more experienced students to expand to a more advanced level
• Unbreakable, reliable
• Efficient, and convenient (hence having a media server, so projects are accessable from any Workstation)
• Not waste money (90% of the time, this dept is very poor!)

Please pull apart these ideas:

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1x 1500GB media server (connected to Workstations via a gigabit switch)

4x Editing Workstations (With PremierePro 2, PScs2, perhaps ONE station running Avid? for students who are ready)
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Final Cut Pro is what you should really be going with.

Get several G5 Machines and an XServe server. With this setup the media can be uploaded directly to the server and multiple people can work on the same media.

FCP is becoming more so the industyr standard where as Avid is loosing ground and is still far more expensive. You get more bang for your buck with FCP.

There are resellers out there who can talk you through specific solutions.

Yes it is on a MAC platform but if you want to give the kids the best solution then I'd highly recommend this.

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Also you can now run windows on macs

I guess I can't disagree with what the others have said but would add this (again) if you feel obliged to stay PC/Adobe.

For the price you will pay for individual licenes for Premiere pro and Photoshop you should be able to buy Production Studio licences instead and get everything you could possibly need in one fell swoop (i.e. Photoshop, premiere, after effect, illustrator, audition, encore + extras). Plpus, get it now and you'll get a free upgrade to the CS3 suite when it's released

At least as a consumer the cost is pretty much the same. You would need to investigate educational licences though.

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