Rumor has it that chris may have mentioned these words: [[ My one and only comment in this thread, then I'll go back to arguing about 2" floppy drives... ;-) ]] My 3-year-old Athlon MP box would beg to differ -- it took a couple of years for Macs to catch up to *it*. Admittedly, it cost as much (if not more) than a Mac -- albeit much less than a dual G5 -- but there's still not many PCs that could hold their own against it nowadays. 3 years ain't bad at all, especially when it's still near the top of the heap; and it's been by far the most stable machine I've owned since my CoCo days. Oh, and a buddy of mine ditched his dual G5 Mac after a *ton* of problems -- so many that he finally got high enough into Apple to get a *full refund*. He says his dual Opteron box kicks it's butt in speed and stability (well, in Linux anyway... but 64-bit Winders ain't really there yet.) [1] I thought the definition of a troll was someone who pokes fun at a person or people to get a 'rise' out of them, especially whilst making advocacy claims that clearly aren't true... -- That said, I like Macs. Really, I do. OSX is getting much better now (improving much more quickly than Winders, obviously) and Apple's made some darned good hardware for a darned long time. My friend still likes his iMac (his wife's machine) and if I had to buy a machine for my wife tomorrow, it would hands down be the Mac Mini. (I don't -- her 1.4Ghz Athlon Shuttle running Linux does more than she'll ever need.) But Apple or their products are *not* perfect; let alone perfect for everyone. And no -- the Mac Mini isn't serious enough for video work, and there are some darned good PC platforms that are. 'Nuff said. Regards, Roger Merchberger [1] That reminds me of the 2 hour pissing match my father-in-law and I had right after he said "I'm not saying this because you don't want to be an auctioneer..."

chris wrote: I won't refute your argument, because it's like trying to argue against artifacts such as the Shroud of Turin: No matter what the facts, it is a religious artifact and is therefore impossible to disprove. I will say this: The tools I work with are not only Windows exclusive, but are also free (avisynth, virtualdub) and the hardware I use has had a total cost of $1800 (the only additions were 1GB RAM, half terabyte RAID, raw 8-/10-bit 4:2:2 YUV capture/edit). I am not working with DV; I am working with uncompressed SD video. My project has tiny margins, so if I am to see any profit at all, I can't go mac because the equivalent would be over double the cost. And I wouldn't have access to my power tweaking toys anyway. Well, to be blunt, can it encode 10-bit video to MPEG-2 MP@ML 1.5x realtime? Or is there a *free* tool I can use on Mac that lets me perform temporal noise reduction with adjustable edge masking? Or a scripting language that lets me perturb video with a series of chained filters and transformations (also free)? If so, please let me know. I am open to new ideas. If I could go back 20 years, I'd buy an Amiga ;-) -- Jim Leonard (trixter(a)oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/