Originally Posted by zrudeboyz
An open letter to those saying to go with a PC for video:
The beauty of Apple is that they give you one software package with everything you need to do all those steps, iLife (consumer) or Final Cut Studio (professional). All of the applications in those packages are great, stable and user friendly IMO. I am a camera operator not an editor, so I mainly use it (FCP) for personal projects.
Mac has Avid too.
I personally find Macs much more stable (unix) and my mac has never frozen to where I have had to restart. I hear that Windows is getting a little better in this regard, but I will stick to mac, you don't have to convert, I'm just giving my two cents.
You're running unix on your Mac? Unix/Linux systems tend to be more stable than Microsoft OS systems. However, XP Pro is pretty good, and I've never had to do a cold boot to fix a freeze. In fact, I've never had a true freeze; though a program may crash, I've never had it take down the OS.
As for all-in-one packages, PCs have them too. Adobe has a very nice suite and, from what I've read, just as nice as FCP. The low-end all-in-one packages, whether Mac or PC, tend to be toys or, at least, incorporate aspects of toys in that they do not provide full control over the edit/transcode/author process. When things are done "transparently," it always involves the software making choices which may not be optimum from the standpoint of a particular process.
It's great that Avid runs on Mac but, unless someone plans to make their living from video, I wouldn't recommend Avid on either Mac or PC platforms -- it's really overkill.