Mac Mini for Video Editing?????

[ravenvii]

I did iMovie and some FCE on a iMac 17" 800 MHz. When I stream my movie from my Sony camcorder to iMovie/FCE, I do get some dropped frames. About two or three in an about 30 minutes of DV. When I find a dropped frame, I just streamed that part from the camcorder again. That fixes the problem, but yeah it's annoying. The iMac only has 256 MB of RAM though. Hopefully my Mac mini won't have that problem with 1 GB RAM!

 

[kaltsasa]

I edited video for a long long time on a G4 533 w Final Cut Pro. Mac mini will be fine. Make sure you get ram. RAM helps a lot on rendering. But quite frankly, you won't be dissapointed editing on a Mac Mini with a firewire drive I'm sure.

 

[madrobby]

The iMac only has 256 MB of RAM though.

Isn't 384 MB required for FCE DV editing? At least the specs page says so. But this is for new version (HD editing requires 1GB RAM).

On my 1Ghz G4 PB with 512MB RAM i don't get dropped frames (capturing to external FW400 Maxtor 250GB drive).

Make sure you don't use a DV casette too often, they tend to get errors over time, though.

One more thing... The internal drive of the mini is not the fastest one, so I would recommend using an external drive (firewire, NOT USB2!).

 

[ravenvii]

Isn't 384 MB required for FCE DV editing? At least the specs page says so. But this is for new version (HD editing requires 1GB RAM).

On my 1Ghz G4 PB with 512MB RAM i don't get dropped frames (capturing to external FW400 Maxtor 250GB drive).

Make sure you don't use a DV casette too often, they tend to get errors over time, though.

One more thing... The internal drive of the mini is not the fastest one, so I would recommend using an external drive (firewire, NOT USB2!).

It was the first version of FCE, I got it back in summer of 2003.

And if you could direct me to a external enclosure that enclosures a SATA HD, and uses firewire, I will buy one on the spot. Because I already have a nice 7200 RPM 80 GB Seagate SATA HD in my PC that I'd like to take out and put into an enclosure.

 

[LethalWolfe]

FW came out in 1995. Pre digital connections you needed to purchase an analog capture card to capture and encode the video on the fly or, for higher end equipment, it probably had some sort of propriatary I/O "way back" in the day. You wouldn't find SCSI or anyting like that on a camera or deck. AFAIK SDI (serial digital interface) has been the standard I/O for pro digital video for a while now (there is also HD-SDI for use w/HD video).

Dropping frames isn't a RAM issue unless you just don't have enough RAM to run the program. Assuming there isn't a software malfunction dropped frames result because the info can't get written fast enough to the HDD. The problems could range anywhere from anti-virus software, to having too many programs accessing the HDD at once, to a lower level issuse hampering the data xfer. I remember back when I was editing on a PC I had to make sure I was running a specific chipset version for my mobo and specific ATA controller drivers otherwise I'd drop frames. Needless to say problems like that really don't exist on Macs because the underlying tech is so uniform.


Lethal

 

[neut]

FW came out in 1995.

ah yes, my earlier post was reffering to when it made it into a production mac (98/99 B&W towers).

FW ... i'm lovin it!®


peace.