ech0419

Ok, My school has an MVP program and we have several computers with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on them.

Currently the IT Dep. is going to format them and put the original disk images on them from when they were first purchased. This is when my teacher thought we should take the opportunity and buy completely new computers.....

My teacher had asked me about a way that we could get macs, or a free or very cheap piece of software that we could put on our laptops. He also asked me why the IT avoids Macs, I explained how even I hate Macs, but they are far superior to PCs when it comes to video editing.

With that said would it be easier purchasing 4-5 Mac Pros with monitors purchased else-where, or even iMacs? We also happen to have a Tablet PC program. With this we could store Adobe Premiere onto external hard drives and store the files on our laptops, we have had multiple problems with people not knowing to store their files on the editing computer and deleting them from, say, their flash drive... My teacher, forced to give them zeros or very low grades for they have almost nothing for their projects because of this.


Simply I am asking if there is an Free or nearly free software that would could get for 600 students and staff or would we just be better off buying 4-5 Macs at $1,500 +...

sinclair_tm

Well, if you're looking foe windows software, then you should ask about it in the graphics section of the forum. As for new macs, they all come with iMovie on them, which I have found to be great entry level video editing software. And then you could just get a bunch of Mac Minis and use what ever monitors and usb keyboards and mice you wanted to.
Just remember, if you want to continue using the same app you have now, you need to get the platform it runs on, a pc if its Windows, or Mac if its OS X.

npjester

the imacs will handle iMovie just fine, if you intend on doing final cut or premiere or anything bigger, goto a pro. But the new iMacs are pretty sweet with the option of 4GB of ram.

just my 2 cents

ech0419

sinclair_tm - We were going more towards professional video editing software... We make several rally videos for our school... District titles sometimes even state titles, so the videos must be big and loud. Our school is quite big on the rallies... and the sports themselves. Other than that we were looking toward the Pro's, I was recommending we don't buy the far over-priced monitors from apple and that we should buy 22in monitors from newegg and/or even duals since we currently have 5 15in flat screen monitors.

npjester - Mac minis would not cut it, the IT guy would no allow something so small, just likeliness of even a church mouse to walk off with one, damage etc. We were discussing running them from 500GB external hard drives on the computers we currently have. That way would would not have to format them half way thru the year to so we have free space on the hard drives. But come to think of it I believe about 5 minutes of uncompressed video takes 1GB. We may want to purchase 1TB hard drives for we use a lot of uncompressed video for our projects. The project I currently am working on takes almost 3GBs and we have 200 students in this class.

If we were to buy macs we would need at least 320Gb's would this come buy cheap with apple? I am not to familiar to Mac pricing for I am a Windows guy.

alt

The apple site has full breakdowns of hardware/costs/comparisons. Check it out.

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...ac/family/imac


Also would like to add that the iMacs are essentially the mabooks. Mobile processors, etc. I don't really understand that but w/e. How else would they fit it into that thin casing!?

ech0419

Ok, I figured that it was mobile equipment on the inside, impossible to put any desktop sized equipment in that case. Other than that I'll see what we can do. I'll post again with what we end up doing.

shuuhen

They do use Core Duo's, comparable video system (relative to the MacBook Pro's graphics card, but maybe a little faster) and the same RAM as the MacBook/MacBook Pro. It is a fairly small space to deal with the heat dissipation. Their hard drives are actually regular 3.5 inch drives like you would find in most towers (like the Mac Pro). If someone needs a faster machine (or a lot of RAM - mobile RAM is expensive), then they should look at a Mac Pro.

That said, my MacBook Pro is plenty fast for almost everything I do. It is one of the best computers I've used. The iMacs should handle iMovie without a problem. If I had some serious 3d rendering or large programming project to build (or other fairly demanding task) I'd probably use my custom tower computer for it.

I like sinclair_tm's idea about Mac Mini's. If you have a local Apple store you could have your teacher go check out the computers in person.

npjester

ok so you read me wrong ech0, i said iMacs not mac minis. and you can get 500gb-750gb (might be 1TB option now havent checked lately) hard drives in the iMacs.

ech0419

Yeah, I'm sorry about that, I did read it wrong. We ended up looking into it and it was way over the budget for the year. As of right now we bought 2 500gb external drives, we'll see how long the computers last before they absolutely need replaced. Thanks for the help anyways.