Need new cheap HW+SW solution - opinion?

[Laco Zamba]

What if I need to buy new cheap HW and SW. What do you prefer?

PC $800
Premiere Pro CS3 $800
Prospect 2K $1500
-----------------------------
Total $3100
- need REDCINE convertion to Cineform


MacBook Pro $2000
FCS 2 $1300
-----------------------------
Total $3300
+ online native R3D editing
+ Color and Motion in FCS 2

Thanks for your opinions.

[J. Bernard Vallon]

assuming this is for red editing?

id be surprized if you can get away with either solution. min system requirments for FCP6 in HD is i think 4GB of ram. pretty sure Color requires a 512 mb video card....and you'll probably want at least a raid 0 firewire 800 something or other for higher throughput...

I just don't know if a cheap solution is going to work, or be more trouble then you thought.

[Chris Kenny]

assuming this is for red editing?

id be surprized if you can get away with either solution. min system requirments for FCP6 in HD is i think 4GB of ram. pretty sure Color requires a 512 mb video card....and you'll probably want at least a raid 0 firewire 800 something or other for higher throughput...

Err... I do HD Final Cut and Color work on a 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM. This doesn't exactly provide stunning performance, but it works. This machine can cut 1080p ProRes decently.

We'll be picking up a Mac Pro for working with Red footage as soon as Apple introduces new ones, though. Cutting HD ProRes files is one thing... transcoding large quantities of wavelet-compressed 4K footage is something else again.

[Laco Zamba]

I'm looking for lowend HD/2K solution for editing.

"Edit with low-quality proxies in Final Cut and then re-link to full-quality 2K proxies to render out my final edit" sounds good.

[Erik Greensmith]

assuming this is for red editing?

id be surprized if you can get away with either solution. min system requirments for FCP6 in HD is i think 4GB of ram. pretty sure Color requires a 512 mb video card....and you'll probably want at least a raid 0 firewire 800 something or other for higher throughput...

I just don't know if a cheap solution is going to work, or be more trouble then you thought.

When I try and run Color on my rusty G5 i.6 it says my wimpy 64 megs of VRAM ain't gonna cut it and I need 128 minimum. MB pro's have 256 cards so they're probably safe.