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Reader Q&A : What do I buy for DV editing?

 

Dear Kevin,

Now my reason for writing to you is I'm about to set up a digital audio/video production studio and i will be grateful if you could help me with what i need to invest in especially in the video editing area. I'm from Ghana in Africa and we are now graduating into DV. We are yet to get into HD. I have been adviced to buy a mac for the desktop.Is mac the only desk top good enough for video editing and graphics. what about the imac. Now with software I'm very confused since there is too much of them.but after reading your piece i'm leaning towards final cut. what do you say.i need advice on the very good 3D and graphics and effects. I have already purchased 2 panasonic md10000 pal camcorders. My budget is limited so something affordable is what i'm looking at. Waiting on your response.

fred.

Hey Fred,

Thanks for your e-mail. I'm not sure how the currency works in Africa, so I can break things down for you in American dollars, and you can head over to Apple.com, for prices and availability.

For DV work, you really can't go wrong with the iMac, which is my platform of choice when it comes to working in compressed HD, and trust me, it handles DV no problem. Here is a good configuration for the iMac to work in DV:

2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB
500GB Serial ATA Drive

20-inch widescreen LCD

2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
500GB Serial ATA drive
ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB
20-inch widescreen LCD

I always recommend that people get as much RAM as they can when they purchase the system, and I would also recommend that you pick up an external FW800 to capture your media onto. If you head over to the www.apple.com website, select the hardware tab, then select the iMac section, and you want the 20 inch 2.66 GHz machine, and then you can configure it from there. The configuration I suggested is about $1700 U.S., but you will be ready to edit not only DV, but HDV and even DVCPro HD and ProRes HD (on an external FW800 drive). The reason I recommend this iMac is that you get a top of the line graphics card, and you will also get a Firewire 400 and 800 port on the back of the computer, which is really handy. As for software, if you are trying to stay within a tight budget, you can go with Final Cut Express, which gets you the Final Cut Express 4 and LiveType. One huge bonus for Final Cut Express is that it supports the FXPlug architecture, which means that you can use popular plug-ins from companies like Noise Industries, BorisFX and Zaxwerks to spice up your project. If you have the money to spend, I highly recommend that you bypass Final Cut Express and pick up Final Cut Studio 2, which will get you Final Cut Pro 6 (for Editing), Motion 3 (for graphics work, including a new "3D" option, which is not true 3D, but pretty close), Soundtrack Pro 2 for audio mixing (including 5.1 for FCP and DVD Studio Pro), Compressor 3 for DVD and web streaming, DVD Studio Pro 4 for high end DVD creation and Apple's Color for high end colour correction. I cannot recommend the Studio edition highly enough. Head over to www.apple.com/finalcutstudio to get a preview.

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