i7 Mac Mini VS i7 PC for HD video editing

[mty]

I have sold myself on the fact I should get onto the Mac platform as it is industry standard as we are told. Saying that what I have seen looks great to me and its something I am looking forward to.
For about £850 I can get a Mac mini i7 16g of memory and a DVD drive
For the same money I can get i7 16g memory 125g ssd 3T hd and a blu ray writer.
An easy choice in anyones eyes but I really do want to use FCP after using CS4 for ages.
The question I want to ask is how fast is a Mac mini. Has anyone done any rendering or transcoding timings ie AVCHD to Mpeg or something like that. Looking at the Apples speed scores it is well below the mac pro`s 160 vs 270. I know its a third the price but what has the pro got this mini desnt have and will I need it.
I feel like an idiot asking what may be simple questions but this £850 is 9 months of scriping and saving ...all for the love of my art

Cheers

Mty[/FONT][/FONT]

 

[talmy]

It all depends on the performance you "need". I've got a not too common use. I've got a MBP with a 2.4GHz i7 (slightly slower than what you are considering). I teach a class and record it. Last session I generated 2 hours of 1080P AVCHD video as well as 2 hours of 720P screen capture. I import both into FCPX doing audio analysis at the same time, but I don't do any transcoding. This takes about 20 minutes. I then create multicam clips of the entire 2 hours, create 4 projects so the individual videos average 30 minutes, add titles, chapter marks, add the cuts between the cameras (pretty fast to do with my lectures), color-correct the camera (lighting is ugly in the classroom) and have it automatically clean the sound. This takes about an hour. At that point I go home (class is in the evening), plug in the computer and let it render and transcode to 720P, 10fps files overnight, which I upload to the server in the morning.

For me, it's plenty fast enough. If I were a pro, I'd certainly edit with more care, and it would certainly take longer, but that's artistic time and not CPU time.

 

[pine88]

Desktop would be way faster. The mini i7 is a mobile chip, the desktop one is the full fat version unconstrained with heat or power limits that are needed for a small mini. Plus, you can overclock that PC to be easily 30%+ faster total than a mini.

 

[bearcatrp]

The PC would be allot faster. Especially if your rendering long clips. You will want a scratch disk (internally) to help speed up the rendering. Move up to CS5 for better options or 6 if you can afford it. With a nvidia GPU, will help even more.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

For that amount of money, you can easily built a proper Hackintosh using an i7 3770K CPU (300 €), a proper case (100 €), a proper PSU (100 €), a proper motherboard (150 to 200 €), a 256 GB SSD (150 €) and two 2 TB HDDs (150 € for both).
At a future point in time you can add a dedicated GPU if you want.

While Hackintoshing your Mac might not seem easy, I got my system running using a rather unsupported board using Unibeast and Multibeast and with the following components I spend less than 1,500 € (1,270 GBP):
i7 3770K CPU
Gigabyte UD-3H motherboard (they were out of UD-5H and UP5-TH (my favourite) boards and I wanted to be satisfied sooner than later (I can upgrade at a later time)
Samsung 840 256 GB SSD
Fractal R4 case
Corsair 650 W PSU
32 GB RAM
Asus GTX670 GPU
USB 3.0 dual S-ATA dock
and probably something else.

This machine, using the correct tools being able to fully utilise the cores and threads, screams. You can get away with an i5 and no GPU if you want, as the HD4000 is integrated into the desktop ix family of current CPUs.