Here in this small Brazilian city at the mouth of the Amazon River, I can count the number of Mac users on both hands. Qualified tech support, forget it. So I'm lucky to have my stable, reliable on-the-cheap Final Cut solution:
Macbook Pro Intel 15" 2.33GHz with 250GB and 4Gb RAM
FCP Studio 2 with Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista etc.
AOC 22" monitor
Harmon/Kardon speakers
LaCie Big 1TB eSATA/USB 2.0 drive (hidden behind the 'book)
Spire 750Gb USB 2.0 External eSATA drive
No-name USB external ATA drive, for legacy archived HDDs
Sony studio headphones
On the side, an iMac DV 400MHz c. 1999. It "belongs" to my six-year-old now, but it still has FCP 4 installed, and it's a comfort to know that in a crisis, I can it get up and running editing SD in a few minutes.
[Packed in box somewhere, the DVD with the original FCP 1.0 pre-release that I won at an Apple promo event in Montreal way back when Final Cut was in its infancy. Was learning to edit on an Avid at the tiime, but with FCP and my first iMac, haven't gone back since.]
Comments
Love the iMac DV. I had a Snow 500mHz. They were wonderful. I actually got FCP 3 to run under the minimum requirements on it.