[GeneA]

The above question was recently posed to a PC user with extensive experience in all kinds of video work. I am posting his reply in this MacNN Forum because I am interested in hearing Mac users' reply:
(Dollar figures mentioned are in Canadian$)

"A computer to work with video????? Personally, I would still stick with a PC as there are more software choices (editing software), and it is much cheaper than the stuff for the MAC. There is low-end crap for the MAC that is reasonable, but anything worth buying will cost a small fortune. The "lite" versions of popular programs like Avid are very lite indeed, limiting you to VHS quality. I have a friend that bought a G3 with Avid Cinema. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why his videos looked so soft until I found the specs. 320 x 240 was the video resolution, and that was the high quality mode!

"A firewire board for a PC is only about 200.00, and the most recent versions of software/hardware break all limits of file size as in the past. My 20 gig UW SCSI drive will hold about 90 minutes of DV quality video.

"DVD-RAM is also NOT a good choice. Cost of the disk is too high, and when storing native DV footage, which is the format you will have to store in if you plan to edit again is 5 minutes per gig. A 4.6 gig DVD-RAM disk will only hold 20 minutes of DV video, and even less for high quality analog, which in full quality mode is 3 minutes per gig. If you convert to MPG-2 format, you are limited from further editing without degrading the picture, as MPG-2 is a very high compression format, and everytime you recompress, you loose quality. The DVD-RAM, or RW disks will only read in the original drive that wrote them, so if your DVD-RAM drive packs it in, and you have to buy a new drive, you likely won't be able to read the disk at all.

"For a computer to do video work, I would recommend a Pentium 3, 500 or faster, and as big of hard drive as you can afford. I am running SCSI, as it is higher performance, but not really necessary for DV editing, as long as you get a 7200 RPM drive you will be OK. (SCSI is a must when using an analog capture board, as analog is actually higher quality than DV. Analog produces up to 7 megs of compressed data per second. Uncompressed analog is 30 megs per second! DV is fixed at 3.5 megs/second).

"If you insist on going with MAC G4, expect to pay about 7,500.00 for an entry level system capable of running DV quality video. A decked out G4, with what I would consider the minimum
for my requirements would run about 10,000 and my optimum choice in a G4 would run about 18,000. That is why I would find it hard to justify the added expense, on both hardware and software to go with MAC. I almost made the switch last year, but stuck with the PC because of the selection of software and plug-ins available. If the price was comparable, then I would go with the G4, but it isn't; so I stuck with my cheap PC!"

[Simon Kornblith]

I don't know a whole lot about DV, but here's what I think...

(All $ figures in this message are U.S.)

Since I don't know about PC editing software prices, I can't say much about this.

Why spend $100 for a firewire board for a PC? It comes built in to a Mac!

DVD-RAM is extremely inexpensive. Disks cost a little more than half a cent per megabyte, and double-sided disks hold 5.2GB and cost $30. It is a little slow, so you may not want to work off of one. I don't know about being able to write a disk, but I know that if you take a single sided disk out of its cartridge, not only can you read it in any DVD-RAM drive, but most DVD-ROM drives too.

He's right that you want a big hard drive, and any current G4 system will probably do well.

SCSI isn't really needed. Firewire can transfer 40MB/s and UltraATA/66 can transfer 66MB/s. These are both built in. If you want something faster, you have to use a striped raid.

You could probably get a nicely configured G4 system for less than $4000 (with FCP). It really depends on what you want.

------------------
Simon Kornblith
Computer Consultant
Programmer

[This message has been edited by Simon Kornblith (edited 06-10-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Simon Kornblith (edited 06-10-2000).]

[exa]

Final Cut Pro is supposedly the BEST video editing software out there, mac ONLY. Any PC Equivalent would cost you well over 10k$ (I hope this is true ) No wonder why your pc friend didn't mention it... anyhow, I'd go with any 500mhz G4 with a lotta ram but with a good capture card like an aurora fuse or igniter (Are those good? I've no clue). And simon is right, ATA/66 does just fine for video, and drives are much cheaper.

[This message has been edited by exa (edited 06-10-2000).]

[reader50]

Details, details...

Firewire can transfer 400Mb(its)/sec or 50MB/sec, ATA-66 transfers 66Mb(its)/sec or 8+MB/sec.
No single drive today can max this out for continuous transfer. Agreed: a striped raid array would be required to max out even the
ATA bus, much less the Firewire.

Your PC source commited several errors:

when storing native DV footage, which is the format you will have to store in if you plan to edit again is 5 minutes per gig. A 4.6 gig DVD-RAM disk will only hold 20 minutes of DV video

DVD-Ram is 5.2 gig (double sided, 2.6 for one side). At 5 minute per gig, this gives 26 minutes, not 20.

The DVD-RAM, or RW disks will only read in the original drive that wrote them, so if your DVD-RAM drive packs it in, and you have to buy a new drive, you likely won't be able to read the disk at all.

DVD-Ram is a recent open standard. It will read/write in any other DVD-Ram drive, and will read in most recent DVD-Rom drives on either platform (if disk is removed from case). Read/write compatibility is a hardware issue in the drive, not an OS issue.

Prices: (all figures in US dollars)
G4-400 $1600
DVD-RAM $ 600
FCP $1000
HD 40GB $ 270 (ATA-66 7200RPM)
RAM 512MB $ 400 (totals 576MB)
Monitor $????

Notes:
G4-400 vs G4-500: The speed increase to 450/500 is minor, the $ increase is major. The 100MB Zip will not be much use for DV editing, the extra RAM included is expensive, and you can buy the DVD-RAM separately. It would be less trouble to just get the G4-500 @ $3500, but cost seems to be a factor here.

You could cut US$320 from these prices if you settled for adding 256MB RAM, and adding just a 20GB ATA-66 7200RPM drive.

The monitor: Cost here is really a function of what you already have, or what you want to get. It would be the same for either platform.

Prices assume you are capturing to/from a DV souce through the Firewire ports. You would have to add more if you wished to analog capture through a PCI capture card.

Good luck.

[This message has been edited by reader50 (edited 06-10-2000).]

[exa]

You can buy dvd-rams for ~260$, creative labs 16x ones... not sure if it'll work on macs though, it should.

[reader50]

exa, where did you see DVD-Rams for $260? All I keep seeing is the $600-$700 stuff.
...this may be why I haven't bought one yet...

[exa]

Look for them at www.pricescan.com , in fact, right here: http://exsccacs1.hardwarebuyline.com/product.asp? STORE=BUY&c=00.00&CARTID=f1ff58284e7dd1d6ca&TSI=BU Y991116D&sync_number=77035]

[This message has been edited by exa (edited 06-11-2000).]

[reader50]

Interesting... The manufacturer's product page is here, naturally no mention of Mac compatibility. It is a fast-SCSI interface (not IDE), still, @ $260 I would rather someone else tries it first.

Update: You can get DVD-Ram TuneUp from Software Architects, the same people that write the drivers for the $260 Creative Labs drive. Looks like it would work for $320 plus cheap SCSI card (which I already have). Much better!

[This message has been edited by reader50 (edited 06-11-2000).]

[exa]

Oh yeah, and reader50, you are incorrect, ata/66 tranfers data at 66MBytes/s, NOT 66Mbits/s... of course, no drive in existence goes that fast

[reader50]

66 MBytes/s? That would be 528 Mbits/s! Faster than Firewire (400Mb/s) or basic Wide SCSI (40MB/s or 320Mb/s) & almost as fast as ultra wide SCSI (80MB). If ATA-66 is really that fast, why would Apple provide an internal firewire connection on sawtooth?
Are you sure about that?

Update: 2 sources agree that is is MBytes/s (Apple TIL & Western Digital). Sorry about the mis-info. Guess I don't have to feel so bad about my ATA-66 interface after all.

...always willing to learn, with the possible exception of WinDos stuff... Thanks exa!

[This message has been edited by reader50 (edited 06-11-2000).]

STOP!
Biggest hard drive you can afford? Don't need SCSI?
What kind of yahoo are you talking to?

First, you DO need SCSI drives, one for audio, the second for video, it would be best if you could put the Operating system on it's own drive as well (although that drive does not need to be scsi)

Why do you need SCSI? ATA CANNOT play video at real time. Why you ask? ATA drives share the CPU with the rest of the computer. The computers CPU has to handle other system requests and cannot give its full attention to proper play back speed. SCSI drives have their own processor built in, ensuring proper playback.(assuming system resources can keep up) Try looping a descent sized file on a ATA drive, and you will noticed "skips"
Also, scsi drives are multitasking, meaning they can perform more than 1 operation at once, where ATA cannot. This is why SCSI is twice the price for half the storage space.

Audio files are HUGE and require their own drive for proper play back even with the multi tasking abilities of SCSI.

I am no AV guru, but I do know that the buddy who gave you the advice certainly is not either.

He's right about the DVD though, but for the wrong reasons, what if the client wants you to bring over the footage and they don't have a DVD ram player???

[suhail]

That PC guy, is definately a bitter Mac basher, even if he knew positive stuff about the Mac he would have not said them.

But Mac bashers are professionals on the PC side, and when they use a Mac instead of admitting they cannot use it, they just say "this is stupid maan!!"

I see Macs on FOX5 running AVID in the background, I see Macs everywhere there is video, I mean come on. More than half of Apple's producs are video products:
FireWire, FinalCutPro, iMovie, iMacDV, QuickTime, Apple Cinema Display.

Remmember Commotion, AVID, AfterEffects, Premiere, they were all Mac first.

The Mac looks and feels classy, which makes you work better because its fun working on such a cool machine. PC users don't have that experience, because they are sheep!

[GeneA]

I've been reading all this very carefully, as I'm the one who started it! I have learned a lot. Thank you all!! I am a too-dyed-in-the-wool Macuser to have accepted my PC friend's conclusions uncritically, and you have corroborated my feelings.

[Simon Kornblith]

Originally posted by the cool gut:
STOP!
Biggest hard drive you can afford? Don't need SCSI?
What kind of yahoo are you talking to?

First, you DO need SCSI drives, one for audio, the second for video, it would be best if you could put the Operating system on it's own drive as well (although that drive does not need to be scsi)

Why do you need SCSI? ATA CANNOT play video at real time. Why you ask? ATA drives share the CPU with the rest of the computer. The computers CPU has to handle other system requests and cannot give its full attention to proper play back speed. SCSI drives have their own processor built in, ensuring proper playback.(assuming system resources can keep up) Try looping a descent sized file on a ATA drive, and you will noticed "skips"
Also, scsi drives are multitasking, meaning they can perform more than 1 operation at once, where ATA cannot. This is why SCSI is twice the price for half the storage space.

Audio files are HUGE and require their own drive for proper play back even with the multi tasking abilities of SCSI.

I am no AV guru, but I do know that the buddy who gave you the advice certainly is not either.

He's right about the DVD though, but for the wrong reasons, what if the client wants you to bring over the footage and they don't have a DVD ram player???

First of all, on SCSI, you still don't need it. You can use FireWire which does 50MB/s per drive. IIRC, FireWire doesn't take up processor, but it may be hard to find a real FireWire drive.

Second, if you use single sided DVD-RAMs, you can take them out of the cartridge and use them in newer DVD-ROM drives. Without DVD-RAM, how are you expected to bring the footage? (I'm not bashing you, I really don't know. On a hard drive perhaps? Jaz? CD-ROM)



------------------
Simon Kornblith
Computer Consultant
Programmer

[tonymac]

I only have a couple of points to add to this discussion:
1. I'm not sure if ATA/66 is 66 Mbits or Mbytes, but my Maxtor 40 gig benchmarks at ~24 Megabytes per second sustained read write.

2. To the person who insists that SCSI is necessary because playback skips with ATA: I've captured video from a friends Sony DV camcorder to my Maxtor ATA hard drive and it played back flawlessly. Again 24 MB/s should be more than adequate.

3. "Analog is higher quality than DV"??? You've gotta be kidding me. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. How can you get a higher quality capture by performing 2 analog/digital conversions?

Originally posted by Simon Kornblith:
First of all, on SCSI, you still don't need it. You can use FireWire which does 50MB/s per drive. IIRC, FireWire doesn't take up processor, but it may be hard to find a real FireWire drive.

Second, if you use single sided DVD-RAMs, you can take them out of the cartridge and use them in newer DVD-ROM drives. Without DVD-RAM, how are you expected to bring the footage? (I'm not bashing you, I really don't know. On a hard drive perhaps? Jaz? CD-ROM)

Big misconception, firewire is a channel in which data travels along, there is no advantage to having a firewire connection of 50 mb/s when an ATA drive can only READ at 5 or so. ATA CANNOT play real time, because it can't READ at real time, because it does not have a dedicated processor on the drive. Fire wire ATA drives are handy because of plug and play, but think about it, why would people pay through the nose for a technology that is not plug and play, unless there is superior performance.

Also, DVD ram has barely been in exsitence for a year now, and there isn't a set standard yet. As well, they have a pooy write speed. Jaz is the standard.

To the doubters of scsi, sure, you can open a quick time movie on an empty desktop, and it will play fine. Try openning a 5 minute file at DV quality with Final Cut Pro running in the background, and you can watch that drive choke on that data like a dog on chicken bones. Every body seems to be misunderstanding me, sure firewire has a descent transfer rates, sure the latest ATA drives are faster, but I am talking about the ability to READ, as soon as the computer needs to send processor power somewhere else, the hard drive will drop frames. Please be reminded that benchmarks and real life applications are like night and day, don't be fooled by documentation.

ok, number one, analog is NOT higher quality than DV. it is uncompressed, and that's why the file size is bigger.

number two, if anyone is gonna do any pro-quality DV editing, they would need a different dv codec. quicktime has some issues that degrade the quality of the video, and although its not too noticable, it is there. i think there is one called dv toolkit. it is highly reccomended.

number three, ata/66 is enough for basic editing, like imovie. i tried final cut pro on a g4/500, and it was ok. it's 27 gig hd can hold about 2 hours of raw footage, plus the system and a few applications. if i was gonna do anything productive with it, i would get some of those ultra/160 scsi drives. they have a maximum throughput of 160MB/sec. a dual-channel card can push 320MB/sec. well, no drives can go that fast yet, but it is pretty fast. also, keep in mind that all firewire drives out there now are actually ata drives with ata/firewire bridges. they are no good at all for editing, only storage.

number four, don't forget to max out the ram. my imac dv/se at home only has 196MB of ram, and professional stuff is pretty slow. final cut pro pretty much flies on a g4/500 with 400MB of ram, i can only imagine it with a full gig of ram.

number five, final cut pro licks anything the pc has. it combines the features of, like, three programs. and having it running on a mac only makes it better. using a mac helps you to concentrate on your work, not seeing if you pc works right.

dabradda

[Simon Kornblith]

Originally posted by the cool gut:
Big misconception, firewire is a channel in which data travels along, there is no advantage to having a firewire connection of 50 mb/s when an ATA drive can only READ at 5 or so. ATA CANNOT play real time, because it can't READ at real time, because it does not have a dedicated processor on the drive. Fire wire ATA drives are handy because of plug and play, but think about it, why would people pay through the nose for a technology that is not plug and play, unless there is superior performance.

There's a reason why I said real Firewire drive. I know they exist or will in the near future, otherwise why would Apple put an internal Firewire connector in G4s? I could be wrong, but I think someone should have made a pure Firewire drive by now.


------------------
Simon Kornblith
Computer Consultant
Programmer

[Misha]

Western Digital has a native FW drive... I believe it gets about 30 MB/sec read and write.

But this PC guy clearly has little clue what he is talking about. He says that an entry level G4 video system will cost $7500, that what he considers the minnimum would be $10,000, and ideal would cost $18,000. But he doesn't explain what he means by "entry" "minnimum" and "ideal."

When you start getting up into the tens of thousands, what really starts racking up the bills are the drives and the RAM, which cost the same on both PC or Mac.

Let's say for arguments sake that his entry level PC system costs $5500 whereas the G4 costs $7500 (I find it hard to believe there could be much more of a difference)... bump it up to his "ideal" configuration and you've got a PC for $16,000 and a G4 for $18,000. That's not a whole lot of difference.

Not to mention the benefits you get from using the Mac OS and Final Cut Pro.

There's a reason Skywalker Ranch and Industrial Light and Magic (LucasFilm's special fx studios) use G4s (along with $100,000+ systems).

FYI, ideally, you'd want Ultra160 SCSI...

[Simon Kornblith]

Misha, those prices in the first message are Canadian.

------------------
Simon Kornblith
Computer Consultant
Programmer

[jswayze]

Pardon the slight change in direction, but can someone explain what the editing software does with more RAM? I'm using a G4/450 with 256 MB right now. What benefit will I see with more RAM allocated to FCP (or iMovie)?

(There are some pretty good deals on RAM right now... help me justify the purchase!)

Jeff

[sblunden]

FCP does not need alot of RAM. 256 is more than enough to run FCP the OS and a few small apps. I talked with an apple rep about FCP and he said the 128 is enough (that was with 8.6, w/ 9 if I've found that 192 is min. b/c of added requirements of the OS) and unlike graphic programs that benefit from more Ram FCP benefits more from Processor speed than Ram.

ATA drives are perfectly fine for DV. In my experience with FCP I have found dropped frames about once every minute of playback. With added numbers of layers of video and audio this number will increase. (I usually have no more than 3 video and 6 audio layers.) For me that is fine for me to preview my work and not worth the extra money for SCSI drives. I am using a G4/400 w. 192 MB Ram. Playback is many times better than playback than on a G3 b/c of the slightly faster drives and faster processor.

Finally you can get a G4/400 add an extra internal ATA drive, and 128MB Ram and have a capable DV editing system. Of course you add things like SCSI and more Ram and slightly increase performance, but is the extra dollars worth it? That is up to you.

Originally posted by sblunden:
FCP does not need alot of RAM. 256 is more than enough to run FCP the OS and a few small apps. I talked with an apple rep about FCP and he said the 128 is enough (that was with 8.6, w/ 9 if I've found that 192 is min. b/c of added requirements of the OS) and unlike graphic programs that benefit from more Ram FCP benefits more from Processor speed than Ram.

ATA drives are perfectly fine for DV. In my experience with FCP I have found dropped frames about once every minute of playback. With added numbers of layers of video and audio this number will increase. (I usually have no more than 3 video and 6 audio layers.) For me that is fine for me to preview my work and not worth the extra money for SCSI drives. I am using a G4/400 w. 192 MB Ram. Playback is many times better than playback than on a G3 b/c of the slightly faster drives and faster processor.

Finally you can get a G4/400 add an extra internal ATA drive, and 128MB Ram and have a capable DV editing system. Of course you add things like SCSI and more Ram and slightly increase performance, but is the extra dollars worth it? That is up to you.

Playback will slow down before it will actually start to drop frames. (It will play all the frames, just at a slower rate. At 30 frames per second, you couldn't notice a slow down to 29 fps. So if your able to "notice" a frame a minute missing, it's probably worse than you think. Using an SGI oxygen, I am unable to playback more than 130 frames at 24 fps at t.v. resolution unless I transfer it to an array. I only know that it isn't playing at real time, because the software displays the frame rate. There is no question weither they are worth it or not, it depends more on the level of work you will be using them for. Since the origional question wrote "limiting you to VHS quality..." I am assuming that the media will be hungry for system resources. Also, with ATA, you can forget about dumping to tape.

Regards

[sblunden]

I don't notice the dropped frames, except for the messages telling me frames have been dropped.