thinking about getting an iMac for video capturing / burning

[geek rock]

is it worth it?

i could build an amazing PC for the same price i could buy the 17" iMac.

Can the mac..

..capture footage with filters, like virtualdub can on the PC?

..easily encode VCD, SVCD and DVD compatible MPEG files?

..easily burn VCDs, SVCDs and DVDs?

..create menus for DVDs?

-Mark

[squeed]

is it worth it?

Yes it is so worth it. OS X alone would be worth the switch. It is hard to explain to someone who doesn't use MAC but trust me. I had a PC for 7 years and I switched to MAC a few years ago and I will never go back.

i could build an amazing PC for the same price i could buy the 17" iMac.

It wouldn't be as amazing as your new flat screen iMac and it wouldn't be as fast either. And, it wouldn't be able to run Jaguar. That whole PC argument that there is no software for the MAC is long dead now that UNIX is here. There are millions of programs that are STABLE that are now available for the MAC.

Can the mac..

..capture footage with filters, like virtualdub can on the PC?

..easily encode VCD, SVCD and DVD compatible MPEG files?

..easily burn VCDs, SVCDs and DVDs?

..create menus for DVDs?

DVD Studio Pro
DVD Studio Pro
DVD Studio Pro
and
DVD Studio Pro

If not that there are a ton of FREE programs out there that will do it as well. It is going to be like quitting smoking, hard at first but all good after that.

Good luck.

-S

[LD-50]

I think the iMac would be a good choice, with a few issues to look into:

1. Disk space. I recently began capturing tv broadcast with a BOB (I would recommend the Canopus ADVC 100). An hour of dv is like 9 GB. I threw in a 120 GB drive and am surprised at how fast it fills up. As long as you can encode/author before you accumulate enough footage to fill up the drive, this seems fine. I can capture 2-3 shows a night and encode/author 2-3 before I need to capture again ... This might be a moot point though — drive space prob. won't be an issue unless you are trying to archive 10 seasons worth of a series ....

2. Software. The Unix software for encoding and authoring S/VCD is great once you get the hang of it — a learning curve is present, but that is the case with any software. For DVD though, iDVD and DVDSPro seem to knock any PC based solution off the box, at least as far as hardware compatibility and interface go. iDVD doesn't let you do VBR encoding (please correct if wrong), so you won't be able to cram like 8 hours of DBZ on 1 DVD disk with iDVD.

squeed is right about OS X though — it is really great. Used 9 for years (still do at work and 10.2 is a great OS. Also — about capturing with filters — am not sure about this, but would imagine QT 6 or FCPro could accomplish this easily (are you looking for color correction?). Hope this helps ...

[jchansen]

A minor correction: Final Cut Pro would be the app to do the capturing and video filtering, not DVD studio pro. The color correction and such is amazing, and if you learn how to use it you can do absolutely professional quality changes.

Also: if you are doing complex captures and edits, you can capture to OfflineRT format, which allows you to save massively on disk space, perform your edits and filters, and finally capture again and export the finished product. This is an advantage of FCP 3. I don't use it because I work on one project at a time, and usually I use one large capture at a time.

An hour of DV is about 12 GB by the way.

The Mac is worth it. All these great OS X apps and Unix ports that are discussed on this forum are proof. Programming seems to be very easy with Apple's tools. I'm trying to take that up myself.

Jeremy

[geek rock]

thanks very much for the replies.

my girlfriend has an ibook, and i was fooling around with it.. i like os x, it's great.

hey LD-50.. yeah, i'd not really planned to keep more than a couple of hours footage on the drive at one time anyway.

I've also heard you can buy an external firewire hard drive case, and fit it with any standard IDE drive.. that sounds like a cool idea.

now i just have to save up the money

Mark