Would a Mac do the job?

Claymore

Claymore

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I have a friend who, doing photography, has certain requirements, and I was thinking a Mac may be the best tool for the job. She needs the following:

Firewire
Photoshop
Animation software
3d software
Video/movie making software
DVD creation

I presume a Mac could handle all this. What can a Mac do out of the box, and what would need to be purchased? What sort of Mac would she be looking at (I don't think she needs the portability of a Macbook)?
 
Both machines would do the job, a Mac would probably do some of those requirements better though.

If you want a Macbook for those requirements and a Macbook Pro is to expensive then you might want to consider a Windows based laptop purely because the screen on a Macbook is not big enough for full time design use.
 
Budget, not sure - but I don't think she wants top of the line at all, and I really doubt she wants a laptop.
 
Claymore said:
I have a friend who, doing photography, has certain requirements, and I was thinking a Mac may be the best tool for the job. She needs the following:

Firewire - Yes - otb
Photoshop - Yes - would need to purchase Photoshop
Animation software - Depends - what type of animation?
3d software - Not really my area - Unsure
Video/movie making software - Yes - otb - software included
DVD creation - Yes - otb - software included

I presume a Mac could handle all this. What can a Mac do out of the box, and what would need to be purchased? What sort of Mac would she be looking at (I don't think she needs the portability of a Macbook)?
Click to expand...
For a serious photographer I'd recommend Aperture or Lightroom. Video - Final Cut Express if it looks like iMovie isnt going to cut it.

If she doesn't require portability I'd suggest a mid-range iMac. Included will be iLife (iPhoto (decent but not nearly as good as Aperture) iMovie (decent) and iDVD (dvd authoring software)) she can always add on a second screen and it has FW400 and FW800
 
Claymore said:
I have a friend who, doing photography, has certain requirements, and I was thinking a Mac may be the best tool for the job. She needs the following:

Firewire
Photoshop
Animation software
3d software
Video/movie making software
DVD creation

I presume a Mac could handle all this. What can a Mac do out of the box, and what would need to be purchased? What sort of Mac would she be looking at (I don't think she needs the portability of a Macbook)?
Click to expand...

Is the work professional, prosumer or amateur? Macs seem to be ideally suited for graphic work, animation, photo editing and finally video editing and effects rendering. I'll speak about the Mac Pro here as this is the Mac I own and have experience with.

All macs come with FW interfaces. The Mac Pro has both 400 and 800 interfaces.

Macs come with very basic consumer level photo editing software. You can download GIMP2 however or buy Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. Those will cost you extra obviously. You'll prolly be able to get PS CS3 overseas (online) for much less than locally though.

Animation software. There are basic packages like Anime Studio for about R1000, there is also Motion 2 which comes bundled with Final Cut Studio 2,
which can do quite a bit of animation. There are also products from Adobe for Flash animation and more advanced 3D animation from Maya etc.
These products will cost you $$$$.

Video editing - outside of products made by AVID, Final Cut Pro is probably the best video editing package out there. If you buy the full suite (Final Cut Studio 2) you will get everything to allow you to do video capture via FW or 3rd party capture boards, effects, non-linear editing, rendering into any of a two dozen HD and SD formats, HD DVD or SD DVD creation (Including advanced menus) and full blown professional audio editing including sound loops which allow you to even compose your own soundtracks. FCP is very powerful in this regard and well worth the money spent if you want to
head that way.

Adobe offers it's own products, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects as well as Photoshop and a number of additional products to create DVDs, edit and modify the soundtrack etc.

Macs out of the box are only good for very basic video editing, and DVD creation. They are not capable of animation or 3D creation of any sort.
If you want to do video editing, you should purchase either Final Cut Express or Pro (Studio). The last app is the professional version yet is very easy to use, for the prosumer/enthusiast.

My only fault with Final Cut Studio is relative shortage of plugins/effects filters - I had to purchase additional ones from Noise Industries, as well as
very basic subtitle support requiring a 3rd party program like Sublime, which cost me R2300, however it is a very powerful subtitler and titler renderer.
 
Last edited:
Thanks guys, some nice advice I can pass on back to her.
 
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