Macs for a TV Productions Class

[obrien234]

Hi,

I'm trying to help my teacher from my TV Productions class at my old high school. He's more of a coach than a teacher, and so he doesn't really know that much about Mac's or video editing. The students primarily use iMovie (unless the have the guts to try to teach Final Cut Pro to themselves) with iDVD. Final Cut Pro 4.5 and DVD Studio Pro (version 3 maybe?? I haven't been there in a while) are installed on the computers, but they're rarely used.

Anyways onto the point. He's looking to buy two new computers, and personally I think he should get some Intel iMac's. Do you think these would be up for the task of all day editing?

P.S. He wants to buy DVD camcorders for the students to do their filming on. From my experience, most video editers use tape rather than the DVDs. Could you give me some good reasons to convince him not to move away from tape?

 

[FF_productions]

It will be a pain to transfer dvd footage to your mac, go with mini-dv cameras with 2 20 Inch Intel iMac's, load them up with lots of ram, and you will make him happy.

 

[plinden]

Image quality is better with DV tape since the image has to be compressed for DVDs - a one hour DV tape is about 10GB whereas the miniDVDs used in camcorders isn't a full sized DVD.

The compression on DVD results in fewer frames per second and is harder to edit. I think you can convert it to avi format but like all conversions this would result in further reduction in quality.

Of course, when you finally burn a DV tape movie to DVD, you probably wouldn't notice the difference.

 

[Vaphoron]

Definitely stay away from DVD camcorders if you want to do editing. Between the time it takes to transfer the movies into and editable format and the image quality, they just aren't worth it. No doubt about it, go Mini DV.

 

[obrien234]

Thanks for the stuff about the DVD camcorders, I think I can convince him. So you guys think that the intel iMacs would be the way to go for sure???

 

[Vaphoron]

So you guys think that the intel iMacs would be the way to go for sure???

Absolutely. I think they are a great way to go.

 

[FF_productions]

Make sure you get some external firewire drives to store your video on. NEVER store your video on the internal drive, it's going to be messy and highly unrecommended.

 

[wmmk]

HD HD cams (harddisk highdef) rock!!!
but they're too expensive. also, analogue tapes with an eyeTV EZ (yes, they are great for transfering anything analogue to a mac a snap) would be über-cheap