Okay, you might have guessed that I'm a Mac user.

My thoughts on what is the ultimate system within reasonable price range.

Excluding AVID DS Nitris and similar that can cost mortgages.

For my money a Mac G5 dual 2.5 liquid cooled processor with 8 Gigs of RAM, two internal 200 GB hard drives and another 2 external FireWire 250 GB hard drives, a Mackie audio mixer, Tannoy reveal active near field monitors (speakers) (because audio editing is more important than the images in my opinion).

Two Apple 22 inch Cinema HD displays, a Sony pro monitor with blue switch, a Neumann u87 mic for those VO jobs (with pop shield of course), Sony DSR11 DVCAM deck.

Now for the software:

Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro 3, Shake (a must), Logic Pro, Photoshop 8, Toast, BitVice and Motion for when you want to play.

This little system is assuming you don't want to shoot uncompressed D9, HD, DigiBeta and the like, it is fine for MiniDV and DVCAM formats. If however you do need uncompressed then a Deckink card, a raid array and a few other bits will fit in nicely.

All the above will come in at around £12,000 or £15,000 for the uncompressed version.

Totally and utterly unbeatable for the money. So many Hollywood movies are coming out of this system now.

Go buy one today, you won't be dissapointed

Considering the price of the system, the hard drive space is quite low (i say that speaking comparitively of course).

But if you want a computer system that's stupidly expensive and looks pretty, you can get an alienware one anyway

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Redefining the concept of low budget filmmaking
Manchester Comedy Forum
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Good to see some Mac questions, and answers, on the forums. Best operating system ever in my view, although I haven't used a Mac recently.

Main problem seems to be cost to power ratio when compared to PCs.

Will be interesting, perhaps, to keep a sideways eye on the Apple mini.

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IBM A51p with 160Gb Boot Disk, 160Gb external Firewire Disk, 2Gb Memory and a super duper sound card, 17\" TFT Monitor etc etc etc
Sony TRV33e : Sony TRV310e : Canon XM2
ULead products mostly including Mediastudio Pro (V8.0), Video Studio 8, Movie Factory 2.0, Premiere Elements

Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.

I'll build you one for £12k guv'nr, and make no mistake!

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Way to go!

Just trying to introduce a little Mac into your lives

But seriously, Mac mini with Final Cut Express, Garageband, OSX and iLife 05 all for £538 inc VAT, what a silly price for a superb HD editing system.

I think the power for power Mac/PC thing is a little dated now. Admittedly 18 years ago it did cost £5,000 for a Mac. These days, I don't think so, especially when you consider the fact that a Mac only dates every 5 years on average, a PC is ready for the skip after 3.

For those who are wondering, I wasn't always a Mac head, I spent 10 years on the dark side I went through Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98se, NT and used Premiere, Media Studio Pro 6 and a couple of other irrelevant ones.

I only got my first Mac about 3 or so years back. So far, I can't see any disadvantage to using Mac over PC. When I switched, I burned all my Windows files i.e. Word, Excel, Power-point, Photoshop and tons of others, onto CD. When I loaded the CD into my Mac, there wasn't a single file the Mac didn't open first time. Totally cross compatible in my experience.

Besides, who says you can't have a PC and a Mac in the same house at the same time, it quizzes me thy people think you can only own one or the other. I know a few people who have both systems.

With the new Mac mini at just £339 you could buy one and just hot-swap the PC display/keyboard/mouse. I spend that on petrol each month