[sodamnregistered]

Anyone here taking a serious look at the $2500 Compaq presario 7000T with DVD-R (the same DVD-R unit in the G4/733)?

It's a P4 1.3 and 256MB R800 RAM and a 40GB 7200rpm drive and a 17 inch monitor.

It's $1000 less than the G4/733 and no monitor.

No iDVD, but Spruce Up! is $150 and so forth. I need to simply put video on a disk, no real "authoring" per se.

I use/own Mac, W2k and Linux. I fully understand using Windows and I'm not a Macwank about it.

[Cipher13]

Get the Mac.
With the velocity engines integral part in encoding the DVD video, I have no idea how long it would take a P4 1.3, not to mention all the problems with the P4's... they are slow processors.
Get the Mac, it'll scream. Plus OSX will love that baby...
Not to mention the G4 has an extra 20 gigs of HD space, runs the MacOS, and is probably faster anyway.
I wouldn't need to think twice...

Cipher13

[This message has been edited by Cipher13 (edited 03-02-2001).]

[sodamnregistered]

I kinda heard that the P4 is "pretty good" at media type things. The longer pipelines do make stuff like Office run slower, but MPEG encoding would be a P4 strong point? Anyone verify the gist of that statement?

Most of the video I do is either short spots or loops. 5 minutes or less, ususally 10 seconds to 1 minute. I'm not going to take a Jackie Chan movie and try to remaster it or anything like that. So I don't anticipate 40 hour encode sessions. Besides, I use Cinema Craft Lite on PC right now and the CBR MPEG-2 encodes look great and it is very very fast. All computers available right now (from any vendor) will choke under a VBR encode situation anyhow.

If the 733 was a dual, then the OSX consideration would be stronger. Hard drives are cheap. A 45GB 7200rpm IBM is $140. So the 20GB is negligible to me.

Somebody sway me, the Compaq still looks good.

Apple- 20GB of extra HD
Compaq- 17 inch monitor and $1000 cheaper

[abnyc]

no way man. my mac will process and playback before the compaq can just process. and then what are you going to use to encode to a DVD? DVDit! crap.

format is half the battle.

what are you encoding with? and how smooth is the formatting process. going from avi to mpeg is soooo cheesy. lets go real world for a sec. capture and format on the fly immediately with media cleaner @ 740/480 res. and 24 FPS. the compaq ships with studio DV from pinnacle to capture and sequence.then you gotta "DVDit", not to mention FCP WILL BLOW IT AWAY in working with MPEG video. now, Cinema Craft Lite is 250 bucks. Cinema Craft SP is 4,000 dollars. get FCP for 999 and you are set. not to mention FCP can also work with DVD Studio Pro. then you are encoding dolby digital along with mpeg 2. prime time **** . then again, its funny how iDVD puts all of that stuff to shame. I can get pretty crazy with it by making my own textures and clips.

word up.

[Misha]

If all you want to do is put video on a disc, use a service like Moments In Time... for $50 they will make you a master copy of your video (SuperDrive can't), complete with index/chapters/design as per your specs.
http://www.moments-in-time.com/

Or for $30 they'll do the same, but without the editing etc... (i.e. a direct DVD copy of your video).

[sodamnregistered]

Alright, getting more interesting.

Currently I make video/animation in either Cinema 4d XL and/or After Effects. I usually work with .tif file sequences since they are so reliable/flexible and platform/format agnostic.

Right now, I take my .tif files (usually made on a Mac) and sequence them in QT. I can "drop" this QT file on Cinema Craft Lite and quickly encode MPEG-2 files.

To master, I would probably investigate Spruce Up! for $130, since, I really just need to get video onto the disk right now.

I own Final Cut Pro- can I basically feed the timeline into iDVD or something similar? FCP works very well with DV, what if I shove 6000 800k .tif files into it? Can I save MPEG-2 out of FCP (using iDVD?) without fast SCSI drives and fancy video capture cards?

Cleaner 5 takes way too long and they only just now released the MPEG Charger ($500) VBR element so I don't know anything about else about it. I have heard no feedback on the Terran MPEG hardware accelerator for $1000 either.

--

Part of the consideration is that I thought Astarte MPACK sucked in comparison to Ligos LSX or Cinema Craft Lite (or even Cleaner5). Is iDVD based on this Astarte encode technology? (Apple bought Astarte last year). It seems like I would have more options on the PC side. Ligos, Cinema Craft, whatever is coming out, etc.

After iDVD and whatever Apple chooses to do with it, are there or are there going to be "options" on the Mac side as well?

Is iDVD Studio merely VBR and more disk authoring options correct?

It's a workflow issue as well. For the most part we create with Macs and playback using Windoze. I'm trying to get my head around the production workflow before I whip out the credit card.

Mac- has edge in workflow (create and burn on one platform)
Compaq- more options once I get my hands on that burner?

Thanks for not making this a platform war, which it is not...

[abnyc]

-its definitely not a platform war. we are media creators, the tools we use are just that. Tools. I use and have used anything and pretty much everything.

If I'm makin a master of anything, I'm going to DLT tape and then to duplication. comps are a different story. the fact that I can make a comp in my studio, present it to my clients, then go to master is the point.

stop motion animation is not something that I would use FCP for.
I use premiere or after effects. AE is awesome for animatics. then save as
raw video and go to mpeg. personally, I author and sequence on the mac. its smoother. if you know what you are doing in media cleaner, you know that that utility is a life saver. when I need to do a quick animatic, Adobe AE all the way, then you can do as you wish.

I like sleek simple interfaces that are industry standard.

for ex: I dont like flash. But I looooooove director shockwave studio. I think premiere is great for quickies and use it often. I have not seen anything that can compete with FCP.

now, dvd mastering on the desktop...its down right the way to go. you can offer diversified services to your clients (I'm talking pro commercial work here, no amateur crap) the ability to do quick presentations and write to DVD is an added revenue stream for me.

iDVD is for kids. but if you have already captured video files in whatever format...or have files that are all ready ready all ready, toss'em in and go to DVD. If you want to put together a quickie on DVD it's sooooo cool how fast one can do so.

It really amounts to the universal capture driver (quicktime) on the mac that makes it worth my while. thats really the benefit here.

Now, I'm taking about more high end commercial work. if you are just sitting at home with the wife and kids are want to amuse the in-laws, get the paq.

You could always buy the Compaq and then buy an iMac with the money you saved. Haha sorry I'm not helping

[schalliol]

Don't forget the quality of Compaq consumer versus Apple. When I worked at CompUSA, we got a substantially larger portion of Compaq's returned because of hardware problems than any other computer (that's right, more than Packard Bell).

This is not a 733 issue, it's a Mac vs. PC issue. If you're really pissed, just buy a 466 and buy a Firewire Superdrive (~$950, though I don't think you get the iDVD license).