22 Jan
2005
22 Jan
'05
12:27 a.m.
As a show of good faith :-) I'd like to make some
recommendations if you're
going to get a Mac Mini for video work:
Yeah Yeah Yeah, I ain't no panty waist amature here... this is what I
went to school for (how I ended up working in computers is still a
mystery to me!) :-)
Believe me, I'd love better equipment, I just can't afford it. (actually,
I'd really love a nice set of SVHS editing decks, and a Video Toaster to
go with it)
- Upgrade the memory to at least 512 and preferably 1GB
if possible. MPEG-2
encoding, multi-layer compositing, rendered previews, caching, etc. all
chew up
RAM. I don't recall if you can upgrade the CPU in a MacMini (or add a
second
one) but it is much more important to max out RAM first and foremost.
Are you kidding... OS X... video or not, you better upgrade to at least
512 MB of ram... I'm still amazed Apple sells machines with anything
less. OS X makes Windows look like a memory conservationist!
- Stick with DV only. DV has a nice low data rate of
around 3MB/s which is
enough for any hard drive to handle. In fact you can composite 3-4
streams on
any cheap modern hard drive and play them realtime.
DV is the only thing I can afford to work with. Cheap computer, cheap
camcorder... I didn't say I was making epics here, I just grab a camera
and shoot things because its what I wanted to do for a living, I spent
all that time in college on the topics, and now don't work in the
field... so its just kind of a hobby. I accept things looking like crap
(hey, it looks better then the work I did on a PowerMac 6500 using
Apple's TV In-Out card and Avid Video... that was some grainy chopping
junk... which was even better then when I used to do analog editing...
without editing equipment, just had to be fast on the fingers and hope
for the best... ahh those were the days!)
- Assuming sticking with DV only, make sure your
workspace (desk, etc.) has
room for a small cheap TV and your DV camcorder. Previewing on a monitor,
however nice, still doesn't compare to an actual video monitor (or properly
calibrated cheap tv if you don't have the cash) for checking saturation,
field
order, overscan/safe title area, etc. Even if it's a cheap $130 15" color
TV,
it's still better to preview via firewire->DVcam->TV. (Assuming your DVcam
does this kind of passthrough, of course!)
Yeah, I got that covered. I have meself a nice JVC TV monitor (not a TV,
that implies a tuner is in it... this is recovered from an old editing
suite that someone else beat me to taking out of the trash, I just got
one of the monitors before they got back for it)
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>