Advice Needed!

[treefidi]

Hi All,

I am about to take my first steps into the wonderful world of Mac after swearing I would never touch one in my life! (I have always been a PC enthusiast since the days of my ZX 81). I am an editor (HD Video) and I wanted to check that the 8 Core Power Mac will have no problems importing HDV footage (Final Cut) and to find out what I would need disk burning wise. (As far as I can see the mac doesn't come with a Blu Ray burner or the software needed to do the burn).

Also a friend of mine told me that apple are about to bring out a new power mac in the next couple of months. Any truth to the rumour and if so is it worth waiting a couple of months?

Thanks for any advice....

 

[Badbaw]

HDV footage is not a problem!

Definitely wait a couple months for the refresh; I think there's concrete truth to the rumors.

Out of curiosity, what made you relinquish your PC enthusiasm?

 

[treefidi]

Well to be honest I still love my PC. (I have been building them myself for years). I like the way they are easy to pull apart for adding new bits and pieces and those bits and pieces are reasonably priced!). I am buying the mac purely as a workstation for editing work and will be keeping everything else (Word processing, emails, gaming, etc) on the PC.

I basically need a machine that does one job and does it well in an attempt to reduce my workflow.

I would love to see how the mac runs some of the games I enjoy (Battlefield Bad Company 2 being a present favourite) but as far as I can see mac doesn't support it.

Does anyone have any idea regarding the difference in spec betwwen the new and old power macs, or is that a rumour too far...?

Thanks for any advice!

 

[DanielCoffey]

If you have slightly older games you want to play on the Mac Pro, such as OS/Amiga/Windows titles, have a look at Paul The Tall's website - http://www.paulthetall.com/ - he uses Wine wrappers to get the games going under OSX. You need the original disc/CD of course but he has developed wrappers for hundreds of older games. There is a forum for questions and requests about specific games too. It isn't very active but he checks it regularly. Thanks to his site I am hooked on Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom again!

 

[treefidi]

Thanks I'll have a look at that. I just hope I don't have any problems with the OS. I gave my wife a Mac Book Pro while she was in hospital (Second child)to watch movies,etc (And to let me have a preview of the mac os!). I will admit to eventually dual booting it and using windows on it. Although I claimed that its because all of the software I own is windows based, it was actually because I got bored of constantly searching for things on the system and not being able to find them!

This time round I will try and be a little more patient!

 

[TheAnalogue]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

There will very likely be a new Mac pro sometime in 2011 or early 2012. Some say as early as august, others say January-Febuary 2012. Personally I think they will come out in October, but that is pure speculation.


As far as the difference between the current generation Mac pros and the next, should be worth it: new sandy bridge architecture processors with faster clocks (maybe even more cores as well). Updated Graphics (likely ATI) SATA III, and hopefully a new case

 

[GGJstudios]

You may have better success in attracting responses to your thread, and you'll make your thread easier to find for those searching for the same answers, if you follow this tip.

 

[CaptainChunk]

First off, they're Mac Pros, not Power Macs. "Power Mac" refers to the pre-Intel Mac workstations that were based on Motorola/IBM PowerPC CPUs.

But anyway...

HDV is an 8-year old codec; you can edit it natively in FCP on a Mac Mini, even. It's not all that taxing on modern hardware.

But I think you need to ask yourself if you really have a reason to move to a Mac. What NLE do you use in Windows?