Must be who your friends are...because most people I know with MACS were using them well before the IPOD came out. Many were using them before even the IMAC. They definitely weren't "CooL" back then. Quite the opposite actually. Most of the IT guys at my office prefer macs, and the main IT guy I worked with 15yrs ago preferred dealing with them after we began to use them at the office - Heck, I know people that teach Microsoft Certification courses that run Macs at home, but use PC's at work. I'll give you the thought that many teens and young people might want them for a "cool" factor, but in NO WAY can you lump "Most" mac users into that category.
I didn't convert to using macs until I started doing video editing. It's the only way to go. Our entire office is mac centric. The only adobe products we use are After Effects, photoshop and illustrator. Premiere has too many stability issues ESPECIALLY on a PC. People talking about $ per cpu power don't know anything about the field. It's about the product you export and you should be on the best workflow possible which is far and away FInal Cut Studio.
Also, You only need a Mac Pro if you are doing 2K, 4K editing or a lot of vfx work in after effects. A 1100 IMAC with a 4 gig ram upgrade will be more than enough for (even 1080) editing.
really? most it guys i know prefer linux then windows then macs. macs maybe good for video editing but are garbage for servers. as for 15 years ago, the only reason why you'd buy a mac is because it was cool. osx is MUCH better then os9. os9 used cooperative multitasking instead of pre-emptive, which meant it crashed about every 30 minutes if your ran more then one app at a time. i was a computer sci major in college and our university lab had macs with win nt machine. if you got into class late, you would invariably be using the macs. at work, i have both a mac and an xp machine at work. i do web based programming and need my pages to render correctly the same on both platforms. i prefer developing on my pc 90% of the time. my advice is that if you solely just want to do video editing, follow people's advice and get a mac (i really can't tell you cuz i have not experience in the field). however, consider things a pc does better. if you want to play games, do office work (ms office is usually one step ahead on a pc and there are a billion of free or low cost utilities on the web), latest and greatest upgrades hardware upgrades for cheaper, better driver support (i had to wait 3 months for a osx driver to a color printer we had at work), etc... a mac is simpler to use, but at a cost of being less customizable (you can tweak more of the windows). both are stable as a rock, compared to previous versions. in general, macs are sturdier than dells,hps gateways etc but are in line with lenovo, sony. the insides are nearly the same now (which is funny because mac people use to tell me how intel processors suck). i don't want this to be a mac vs pc thread, but there's a reason why pc has such a large market share... and saying price is the sole reason is like saying only hipsters by macs. i'm not encouraging you to buy a pc either since i really don't know about video editing. hope that helps.
I didn't say anything about friends, but thanks for the not so subtle attempt to say I must have superficial, trendy friends. That would be a convenient explanation, no? I'm talking about coworkers, classmates, and even people I've heard chatting at the Apple store. In fact, I couldn't name a friend of mine who I know for sure has a Mac. Both my sisters (in their 30's) prefer Mac, but one of them is a music teacher and one of them was a photography major when she got hers. I think their choices were more about software and ease of use than trying to be cool...but who knows? I doubt that even my own sisters would admit to buying a certain computer just to raise their social status. Now, before anyone else gets their panties in a bunch because I made a statement that we all know is true to some degree, I should clarify that I never said anything about the majority of Mac adopters choosing the platform because they wanted to be hip. I only said that I'm sure many of them did. Somehow my detractors transformed "many" into "most" or "majority" when they are entirely different terms. That's the only time I used the word "mostly" or "most" in anything I said.
I'm not a pro but I do alot of video editing for my church, I use Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 and it works great on my basic basic Toshiba Amd Turionx2 64 on vista.....
Didn't mean to insinuate anything about your friends at all..you read in to that a bit more harsh than I was thinking. Actually, that response was suppose to have been pointed at BmwM3 who was talking about his friends. Sorry, that part is my mistake. But, to be fair, you did mention that you didn't want to spend 2-3X the amount "Just to impress" people - conotating that you believe it is a huge reason why someone would buy a Mac.
These threads always derail. And it inevitably includes a comment that 'many' Mac owners bought them for hipster appeal. These discussions bring out the jealousy in people. Spoiler I'm not saying all Windows users are jealous. I'm did not say any in this thread are. I did not type that. I'm just saying there are some out there, we all know it's true. I'm also being somewhat ironic to make a point. I did some research for audio production when it came to 'new computer buying time'. The best research I found (besides some hands-on testing) was from specific message boards. Hopefully people here can recommend a few video-editing specific message boards for advice. Preferably NOT a FCP or Vegas specific board, which will obviously have skewed preferences - except if you want to learn about specific features.
I am a pc user and really I dont see my self changing to a mac for everyday use.... I do have a home recording studio and run live sound with vista. Thou I am looking to buy a Mac in the future for my recording studio.
I'm actually quite the PC fanboy, but all of my close relatives in the TV industry use Macs, as well as my friends in print and graphics. So, whatever. I know I'm not wrong.
I have to disagree about them being cool 15 years ago. Apple wasn't perceived as "cool" until the iPod and to a lesser extent OSX were released. That's my experience, at any rate. I've had a Mac since 1992, and the only people who understood why were the few other Mac people I knew. Most people I knew back then had PCs and thought I was crazy and/or didn't know anything about computers. And my various Macs have all crashed at one point or another, but it was never a common occurrence, even with OS9 and earlier. I'm on a MB Pro now running Snow Leopard. It's rock solid and I was more than happy to pay the premium. And for what it's worth, I still occasionally use my Toshiba running XP from time to time. I've always preferred Mac but XP did what I needed to do despite occasional crashes and Blue Screens, which gave me the opportunity to play around with XP a little bit. Not trying to argue....just putting in my two cents about my experience.
That XPS studio 8000 Desktop for $800 is faster than that overpriced Mac. If the Intel Core i5-750 Processor is a quad core(I believe that it is), it will destroyed that Xeon processor twice the speed in certain programs. Don't listen to people or profession that say MAC are better. I work in this industry and the most reason some company will be using a Mac because they are professional/nicer looking than a regular PC but with a bigger budget. You can put together a much better machine for video editing with that ridiculous price of $2500 than that POS that you're getting from CrApple.
the mac pro is soooo overpriced... i just got the Dell T3500 precision workstation. Xeon 3520 Quad Core (basically the xeon version of Core i7-920) 6GB ram (tri channel) 320gb 7200 hd dvd burner win 7 pro it was $1150 from the outlet store with tax and shipping. Iam going to put a new video card in there..probably an ati 4670 or something. For more than double the price you're getting half the ram, but double the HD.
