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To: Don Green who wrote (32915)	3/27/2002 2:57:38 PM
From: Doren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213182

From my experience a firewire card on my PC might have worked. Sometimes. Maybe. Assuming I was able to figure out how to config the dang thing. And the config wouldn't just go away for no apparent reason from time to time as seems to happen on windows systems. On my mac I've got a seperate system set up so that firewire always works without fail, very easily. My USB still camera works without fail, my burn As a matter of fact I've got 6 systems on set up on my Mac. I've tried that on my PC and it was a nightmare. Here's my setup: 1) OSX for exploratory use 2) 9.22 for gradual migration to 3) 9.04 my standard system tweeked over the years to perfection 4) 9.04 an exact copy of my standard system on a different physical disk in case I have a system or drive problem 5) 9.04 my video system 6) 9.04 a stripped down system for maintaining my disks and registries with utilities My other mac an 8500 with a G3 upgrade card, also has 4 partitions each with a system, easy as pie, never a problem. It's networked through my router to my G4 using Apple talk. Networking could be easier, it's not good but not horrible. The 8500 is still a pretty good machine which I use for burning CDs and printing while I work on my G4. My Athlon has one partition with Win2K only. I have no desire and will resist XP due to the predatory nature of Windows. I went through the biggest nightmare of my computer experience with this computer trying to use Partition Magic, NT4 and Win98, was going to install Linux but never got to the point where I had a stable enough system and I could imagine the config nightmares there. Getting it connected to my router is a nightmare, it works when it wants to. iExp tells me I'm not connected when I am connected. Configing video, ethernet, and etc cards is for someone experienced with obscure and arcane languages. Multiple windows input boxes with conflicting dialogue and duplicate dialogue boxes where one doesn't know if one affects the other. Unclear "Close" "Apply" buttons are also big problems. Both prime BLUNDERS in the usability world. Had a problem upgrading the CPU despite the fact the connectors were the same and theoretically it would work it never did. Worked only intermittently. I paid top dollar for every component using the best 300 W Sparkle Power supply, the most stable board (according to the forum at Ace's), quality ram, quality hard drives, triple fan with grease and a nice heat sink, a good solid case etc. I spend months researching hoping for a stable system. It was for 6 months or so. At one point I considered buying a Compaq but alway found a cheap or crappy part on them. I later learned they'd coupled 250W power supplies with Athlons which REQUIRE 300W power supplies. Lucked out on that one, I pity the poor people who had to live with those crash machines. I did try using a Miro board at UCLA on a Dell multiprocessor machine with gobs of ram that none of the 3 Admins were able to get working stably and even when it did work it dropped frames. These were good admins with experience using lots and lots of media devices, including music system like ProTools, infrared networded sensors, video editing on Linux, other UNIX systems, Macs, and PCs, over a Novel system on multiple Dell servers, and they also had experience writing pearl as well as other code. One of em helped produce the first commercial CD. At the time I ended up using Media 100s and firewire Macs, and even messed around with an Avid system, but that's why I bought my G4 as soon as they came out. The Media 100s and Avids were great but the firewire machines were even better and way, way cheaper. So doing video on my PC... well I'd try it if I HAD to... The truth is I hate Macs less than PCs. Macs have plenty of problems and I regularly critisize them to my students and on forums, as I critique PCs. PCs are worst from many standpoints though, Macs eat PCs when it comes to Video editing in ease and rendering, except at the very high end where PCs have a small advantage in processor speed.

To: Don Green who wrote (32915)	3/27/2002 6:52:56 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213182

Don, now it's obvious that you're just posting a straw man argument: Well that is a real difficult problem to overcome, like buying a firewire card for your PC?? I think most of us know that there is quite a bit more involved in editing your first video beyond just "buying a firewire card." You then have to install the card, then figure out why your machine won't reboot, and run the driver installation wizard which will promptly crash your machine when trying to restart so you restart anyway, hoping it didn't crash while trying to install something important, then having to reboot in Safe DOS mode to edit your CONFIG.SYS file as per the manual's trouble-shooting appendix, and when you finally get your machine back to where it was before (except that now your external hard drive mysteriously doesn't automount after every reboot, probably some sort of IRQ conflict or resource allocation problem, but who knows?), you can run your ULead Studio that you also had to install separately and that was a bitch but that's another story. Of course ULead Studio is incompatible with your Windows Media Player, so you buy DeBabelizer Pro to convert between the file formats. And you can never quite figure out how to to a simple cut/paste edit in ULead because the manual was apparently written in Swahili and translated to Chinese and then translated to English. Or hell you could just buy a Mac, plug your camcorder in, and click on iMovie in your Dock, and press the little button that transfers a tape into iMovie and automatically breaks it into scenes for you. If you had tried this on both a Mac and a Wintel box, you wouldn't suggest that editing video requires simply "buying a firewire card for your PC." Dave