Please Help Me Buy A Mac Mini

Chris: To answer your question, no, I'm not going to be doing any kind of complex editing. I think what I'll be doing mostly is re-editing old 8 MM films, adding music , and restoring color and sound. Hardly anything where I'm shooting my own video, BUT, I will be doing some of that later on.

Now that Ive read thru this thread, it seems to me that I all I really need to do, is buy Adobe Premier, and run it on the heavy duty PC I built last year.
My PC has 32 gigs of RAM, 500 gigs of HD space, Sandy Bridge i5 2500 3.30 GHZ processor, and I have an external 1 TB hard drive. The only thing I know I'll need to buy is a good video card, since I'm running off the on board video today. I *wanted* to learn FCP, but with all I've read, that would be a pretty expensive proposition now.

Would you say that Adobe Premier is a semi-professional product?

Thanks!
Mike

 

premiere is a fully professional product. and that's coming from a (legacy) FCP user. your system and premiere will be more than adequate for the kind of use you're describing.

FCPX sent a lot of professional video editors back to the premiere stable after a fifteen-year hiatus.

 

If you've got a fixed number of films to do, you can subscribe to Premier for the duration. Don't know that buying is an option anymore. Still if your not a pro with an existing workflow to unlearn, you would be hard pressed to beat FCPX especially at that new price point. Many of the limitations that sent pros running initially have been addressed. I mean do you need Multicam on such features?

 

Tiger is right that it'd probably be faster to learn FCPX than premiere if you're choosing between the two as a novice to the sport.

 

Really? I would think it would be the opposite.......FCPX is not hard to learn? Also, I'm a PC guy, and have only basic MAC knowledge.

 

ok, let me put this another way...what would be the least expensive MAC option for me if I bought FCPX? Would a 2015 Mac mini do the trick?

 

For that, iMovie would work fine.

I'd invest in a nice large SSD and mount it internally to hold project files.

I've not used Premiere. I plan to check it out, but I'm honestly always either shooting video or cutting video so I've not wanted to try to do a project on a different tool. I use the fairly obscure Grass Valley Edius, which has the advantage of being insanely efficient for multicam, which is 100% of my editing. I also use Sony Vegas, which evolved from an audio DAW, and has better audio tools than anything else. You can do a 32 channel mixdown and a multicam edit in the same interface.

The thing is, with the hardware you have, you can download trial versions of Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, and even my beloved Grass Valley Edius and decide for yourself.

 

Thanks Chris. I actually do have my OS on a SSD, its just not a huge one, but I could still install the editor on it.

I guess I'll try Premiere. I already use Adobe Audition for my Audio restorations.

 

Not as important to have the software and OS on an SSD as it is to have the actual video files on one. There are 1 terabit SSD drives selling for $300 these days, and the media files are where you're going to see the real speed increase. Generally speaking, the program loads into RAM once when you launch it, while you're constantly accessing the video files as you edit.

I use Audition on virtually every job, and have since it was called Cool Edit Pro.

 

Great point Chris, thank you.