hey guys:

i have decided to switch from win/premiere editing to osx/fcp editing. i just ordered a dual 1.8 g5, monitor, and the production suite (fcp, dvd sp, motion). the g5's are on back order i believe so my ship date is "on or before sept 14" acording to apple.

should i be worried about a big price drop being announced at the apple expo this coming week? anyone hear anything that should be cause of concern?

also, are there any things i should make sure i get or do since it's the first time i've moved from win to osx editing?

thanks for any and all help.

I don't know about price drop, but I'd be buying at least the 2ghz model, and making sure I don't have the "stock" graphics card, but at least the ATI9800 model, especially for Motion.

Graeme

I check the rumor sites a lot and from what I've heard there are no changes slated for the G5s right now. Most of the buzz is about the new iMac G5.

BTW, welcome to the forum and the Mac world.

I haven't heard of a price drop. I also agree with Graeme about upgrading the video card for Motion.

Upgrade the video card definitely. I'm not sure what would happen if by some miracle the price DID drop, but then, your Mac won't be delivered until well after that so you could always cancel your order and place a new one. I seem to remember Apple simply alerting people with pending orders that they will get the new, lower price or even the newer model.

Doing OSX editing is pretty simple, the only things I would advise is upgrading the video card for motion, buying a second internal drive or external FireWire drive, and maybe increasing the RAM. Don't buy the drive or memory from Apple, they are much more expensive.

If you are into it, there are some great Unix type pieces of free software out there that can help back up your projects.

Thanks for all the advice guys. I opted for a 250GB drive, uped the ram to 1GB with expansion for another GB, and got the ATI 9600 with 128mb ram. The reason why I didnt get the 9800 was because the price was over $300 more. Should this be something I really should do since I will be using motion?

Since I have used Linux a lot, I'm excited about OS X being based off of BSD. Can't wait to get going and look forward to checking out the NLE on Mac thread much more often!

Go for the better card if you want to play with Motion - it's vastly superior.

Also, get more than 4GB of RAM as motion eats RAM - and OS X loves memory!

Graeme

Well, if your a Linux person, you should check out macdevcenter.com for some good scripting you can do and add it to your cron jobs. When buying RAM I'd suggest not buying from Apple as they charge quite a bit. If you are using Motion then your setup is good enough to get started without too many headaches. If you are maxing out the system you could upgrade later... which isn't so bad because I'm sure the video cards will come down in price as more become available. If you have the money now though, and you know you will be using Motion quite a bit, you might want to go for the upgraded card and more RAM now.

Barefeats compares cards:
http://www.barefeats.com/rad9800s.html