now i have always admired Apple's product from afar, but with this mac mini i would truly begin my love-affair with Apple. now, i'm not a mac-head by any stretch, but this little thing, with all the apps a user could ever need and want, was just the perfect little package. after learning of its technical specs (ever since the days of the PowerPC G4) i felt impressed how this squarely shaped laptop (without a keyboard, mouse, video display, and battery) can pull the necessary weight to run some pretty hefty media projects.
though the mac mini is marketed as a desktop CPU, underneath the hood lies the layout of a laptop. think about it. all the components inside are all laptop grade - the processor, hard drive, memory modules, the cd-rom, and the video processor are in line with Apple's MacBook (without a keyboard, mouse, video display, and battery of course). and yet amateur video editing can be accomplished with ease and simplicity.
to be fair, perhaps, the mini isn't a big deal. these days even budget laptops PCs you can pick up in Wal-Mart can perform video editing and other multi-media tasks on par with the mini. so there's more to it than the hardware aspect. after all, todays Macs are built using an Intel architecture, so ipso facto Macs are PCs despite the Apple logo.
both of my mac minis came with Mac OS 10.4, Tiger, and for some reason every app that operates under this O/S feels so much better than their MS Windows counterparts. for example, i run Handbrake on my minis to convert my DVD collections into movie files i store on my home file-server. Handbrake is about the coolest app to use and it runs so beautifully. i loaded Handbrake to my bother's new HP laptop that he got from Best Buy a week ago. thinking that the Windows version was just as easy to run, much like it does on the mac, i found that it didn't work right. at first i couldn't get it to read the DVD-rom. then, when i thought i figured it out, it caused the system to freeze. i don't pretend to know what happened, but there it is. now i'm sure there's a good reason why it didn't work, but who cares. it runs great on my mac, and my brother is just going to have to learn enjoy his movies off his DVDs.
during the course of editing "Dyson's Revelation" i used the installed iMovie HD 6. the rough cut of the video was so much better than i first imagined with respect to editing and piecing other aspects of the video together. the initial experience was rough, but after some time i learned of better techniques, and corrected the mistakes i was making. in the end the process became smoother and manageable allowing me to concentrate on the project itself.
i had hoped that someday i would graduate from working on iMovie to Final Cut Express 4 (FCE4), but before that would happen i felt it necessary to get a better system. in August 2007 i made a new purchase for a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz,2GB memory mac mini. following that on November i bought FCE4. to my surprise my 2Ghz mac mini ran FCE4 well enough to edit the final version of my video. however i have yet to fully experience FCE4 in with all of the settings set to high. i have had to cut down on the real-time playback feature in the canvas screen to 1/4 frame-rate, and the video quality to "Low". this made reviewing my video, prior to exporting it to a movie file, though do'able, rather annoying. i truly enjoy working with FCE4, but on a mac mini without a real GPU with its own dedicated video memory, it's just not enough.
if you're wondering what happened to my 1.66Ghz mini, it's enjoying a good life as my new media center in my living room attached to a beautiful 32", 720p, Sony Bravia LCD, and wirelessly connected to my home network thanks to my Airport Extreme.
so i'm looking on Apple's store site and checking out the macbook pros (MBP) under their refurb area, and i must say they have some pretty impressive deals on 2.4Gh with 2GB of memory, and an NVIDIA GPU equip with 256 MB of dedicated video memory for less than $1700. it looks like i'll have to work some O/T to get one, but it's about time i got a laptop, and if i'm going to get one it might as well be a MBP. like iMovie to FCE4, it's time to graduate to something better, and add it to my list of enjoyments.
peace,
@riel
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