Have I gone mad?

[Meshugana]

I place this post knowing that I may get flamed as a heretic. I have been looking into building a new box to use for video capture, editing DV from my camcorder for family use, surfing, some gaming but I do not need intense 3D. Ideally, I want stability, simplicity, and speed. Waiting for ever for rendering etc will make me not likely to use the box. I was planning on building the following... Kt266a, Athlon XP 1800+, 512mb PC2100, RAID, either DV Raptor or ADS PYRO for capture, and WinXP Pro.

I cannot believe that I am even going to pose the question... A friend of mine has been needling me to get a new iMac. He says that they are better with DV and much more simple. All the software I would need is included. It also has DVD burner. He reports that they are incredibly easy to use and that my wife could even edit DVD without problems. Finally, my wife wants this box to go into a room where it would be hard to keep it away from small kids and she doesn't like all the cords/cables of a PC. Is my friend correct that an iMac can do quality DV editing straight out of the box? Are they fast? How would it compare to my proposed system above with regards to quality, simplicity, stability, and speed? How does the apple software compare with Adobe Premiere? Now, this is not to replace my current box, only to supplement. I am not considering going completely Mac. But have I gone completely mad? :Q

 

[BAMAVOO]

Macs are all that our Advertising department uses...I will say I have not seen them do video but Photoshop flies!!!!!!!

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

The included iDVD will never match Premiere on features. No idea what the performance would be like since Mac sites only compare Photoshop performane

-Ice

 

[imgod2u]

If you're into simple video editing such as drag-and-drop writing dvd's without much detail, in other words, the idiot's video editing kid, the iMac would be perfect. If simplicity is a must, the by all means get one. I would even suggest a fully loaded PowerMac G4 if you could afford one. Keep in mind though, this is only for simplicity. Speed-wise, the iMacs are pretty decent, but no where near top-notch, nor for functionality, expandability, etc. If you want to be able to use this rig for anything else, I wouldn't suggest an iMac. Perhaps a PowerMac G4 fully loaded desktop, but not an iMac. As for software, the software that comes with the Macs is the idiot's software, to say the least. It works pretty well, for the simplicity it gives you, but is no where near the functionality of Premiere. As for small programs which give you a lot of functionality in a free software (and I use this a lot more than Premiere) like VirtualDub or FlaskMPEG. There's also Pinnacle Studio SE and Ulead MediaStudio which are also great. I'm not sure whether they are available for Mac or not (I know Premiere is).

 

[novon]

don't do it man,

 

[Meshugana]

Thanks for your replies. I am going to go check out one of the new iMacs, but with some caution. The best one comes with 800MHz G4, 60gb HDD, Superdrive, and 256 RAM (I would upgrade). This seems to have much more power than the old ones and comparable to a regular Mac. Any more thoughts are appreciated. Thanks.