mac people I got questions
 

im thinking of making the switch. I would be getting final cut pro studio and ps.
Now Im looking at a refurbed mac pro with 2 dual xenox cpu's .Now the question is can I just buy ram and hard drives and put them in instead of getting ass fucked from apple?The other scenerio is:
Now if I decide to go instead with a 24 inch imac with 4 gig of ram dual core 3.0 would that have enough processing power to edit video?

you can buy ram for macs at www.crucial.com

Yes you can use any ram and hard drives you want.

The desktop macs (not imacs) are fully upgradeable...

The imac you can upgrade the ram yourself.

Video editing and rendering takes INCREDIbLE amount of ram and processing power.. You will see lag while using the imac depending on what you are doing it could be unbearable....

Does I -mac have a place to attach e-sata drives? I just got a macbook pro and have a express card that allows 2 e-sata Lacie drives to be attached so I can use 3 drives total.

Yea....you can use any HD and RAM just like with PCs...doesn't have to be Apple brand.

And I have a last-gen (white) 24" iMac with 2.5gb of RAM. I edit HD with it in Final Cut and dont have any memory/lag issues, unless I have a few other heavy programs open like Photoshop and Bridge.




...make the switch....you won't go back :)

no it looks like firewire and usb

Ok cool I never have more than one intensive program open now when Im editing on a windows box.

Hey Tony, I use a 24" Imac with 4 gig of ram. As far as video editing I love it. It will get it done cleaner than a pc, but I still have to run one or two pc programs on my Mac. There are certain things like my html editor that is just better on a pc. The best free program for editing video on a Mac is Imovie 6. (not the new one, it sucks) http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html
Here is a trailer to a movie that I edited on imovie 6. Thrust Trailer
As far as converting to different formats (DV,FLV,WIN,AVI) it is best to use a program called Visual Hub.