I'm trying to find a way to capture video and edit on my iMac. I read a little about Avid Cinema USB, but I don't know. It seems kind of dinky. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks

-- J. Landrum (jjland@earthlink.net), July 15, 1999

Answers

Sell your imac.

-- Thomas Koch (coast3@execpc.com), September 01, 1999.

A lot of people knew the new Imac's were coming and now they are here as ImacDV's. The ImacDV Special Edition is the best deal and what you will need if you want to use a full professional edit software like Premiere 5.1 or Final Cut Pro. The regular ImacDV's come with 64 megs of ram, a 10 GB hard drive and in 5 colors. The ImacDV Special Edition comes with all the same software(including iMovie) but with 128 megs of memory and a 13 GB hard drive.

Regular ImacDV's are $1299 and the ImacDV SE is $1499.

You might be able to use EditDV or Strata Videoshop on a regular ImacDV with MacOS9. If you want to use Premiere 5.1 or Final Cut Pro your going to need all or most of 128 megs for the application itself so you would need at least 64 megs(better to get 128 meg more) of additional ram. Remember that you have only 2 memory slots in the Imac

Another thing that some computer savvy users have done is either replace the stock hard drive or add another hard drive to the existing one. I read about this at www.macnn.com click on Forums then Imac

For the non DV Imac's you can edit digital video on them with a third party USB add on card(The XLR8 system is better than the older Avid Cinema) but the quality would not be the same. However it would be fine for Web or CD Rom use.

Hope this helps, Michael C

-- Michael C (dontemail@hotmail.com), October 24, 1999.