I have just started a 3 year mulitmedia course and we got on the subject of buying a mac today. Guys taking the lesson seemed to think that we would get a way with buying a minimac if money was tight. Is the minimac, with 1gb of memory, enough to handle FCP.

Thanks in advance for your help

It should run FCP, but certainly not a peak performance. If you're editing HDV it will be slow. For regular DV is should certainly be usable. I spent awhile editing on my 2 year old 1ghz powerbook while out of the country this summer, and it was very serviceable. However anything which requires rendering gets time consuming. Have a look at these threads:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=38260
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=39979
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=37648

Also see the sticky about which mac to buy:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=51730

Andrew,

I edit on a Mac Mini using FCP 5 and it does fine for DV. Haven't tried HDV yet but you cannot cut uncompressed SD on it.

I would wait a few days as rumor has it that they are being updated with better video, faster processors, and faster drives. I've heard that they are even shipping the new ones that are 1.5 ghz even thogh they are in a 1.42 package.