Being given a Mac - Help me make the most of it

Streeteh

Streeteh

Streeteh

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In the switchover to an academy (the new, good kind) my school has decided to try and overhaul as many as the departments as it can with the small amount of extra moolah they now have.

In Media's case, we're getting Macbook Pros as our current laptops were manufactured in 2005, not ideal. Now I personally am a PC guy, but i completely understand why a Macbook is a more logical option given that we do huge amounts of video and photo editing. I'm going to bootcamp it with Windows 7 (licence also supplied by the school, lovely fellows) and have my own copy of CS5 running on that. I'm going to install CS3 Production Premium using the schools site-wide licence on the Mac as i really can't afford another licence for CS5 out of my own pocket.

Now, i'd like to get the most out of it, but purely for work. I very much want to avoid turning this into a leisure device as i really appreciate the school forking out for it and don't want to take advantage. What's the best presentation and word processing software? I'd also like some form of video converter as CS3 is quite limited in what it supports. What sort of accessories are essential, particularly for hooking it up to a VGA projector?

What else is there worth getting for a workplace Mac? I literally know nothing about OSX so go as basic as possible, i want to make the most of it!
 
My choices for the following would be...

Word Processor: Pages
Presentation: Keynote
Video Converter: Handbrake
 
THanks guys.

Unfortunately Handbrake only seems to convert to MKV and MP4, both of which CS3 struggles with. Ideally i need avi or wmv, anyone know of anything that will do that? Might just fork out for another iskysoft licence.
 
mpeg streamclip is a powerful little tool. i find it a lot easier to use as well. it wont do WMV's though. for that you need to buy a Flip4Mac license other wise you will get watermarks
 
The best office package in my opinion is Office on Windows. Never been much of a fan of Pages/Keynote and Office for Mac, although it's improved over the years. There are also potentially some cross compatibility issues if you share a lot of heavily formatted documents across departments. If they are giving away W7 licenses it might be worth seeing if you can bag an Office license as well rather than pay out of your own pocket for something OSX based. The problem is OSX is better on the battery than Windows is so your battery life is going to suffer if you spend a lot of time bootcamping. You might want to look into Parallels virtualisation so you can stay in OSX and have the best of both worlds, but you really shouldn't have to pay for this yourself if it's for work.

Personally the logic is lost on me why they would give you a MacBook Pro for photo and video editing if there is any kind of budgetary limitation involved, they must have spent an absolute fortune because surely they've not given you the pokey 13" version.
 
I use a Mac in a school environment. When you factor in the cost of additional video / audio editing software, lower-end macs suddenly start to make financial sense!

Anyway, give the latest version of VMWare Fusion 4 a try. There's a free trial on their website, it really is excellent at integrating Windows. I have a W7 install full-screen in a Space and can switch in and out of it fluidly.
 
You can technically install CS5 on both sides. The licensing dictates you could install on 2 machines...technically a desktop computer and a laptop being the idea without breaking any laws or having activation issues.

Depending on the way their licensing works with CS5 these days (can't remember) I think the only difference in the box products is the media set that comes with them. If you download a copy of the trial for your version it might be worth a go?

Although if you have it installed on a home PC that won't help you.

In terms of other Apps, I'd go with Office, it's generally used more than Pages, an last time I checked you could open Word docs in Pages..but not Pages in Word. Though Pages does allow you to save a Word compatible format.

VMWare is ace as well, allowing you to run both Windows and OSX at the same time. This should install NTFS-3G to allow you to read/write the NTFS file system for your Bootcamp install of Windows, then get Mac Drive for the Windows side to go the other way.

Handbrake is good, although the latest version I've seen only seems to convert for Apple devices, rather than having access to different settings. If money wasn't too much of an issue I'd say get something Like Sorenson Squeeze. Failing that, just export the videos to a folder that Windows can access and then re-encode them in the Adobe suite. It's a bit awkward..but gets you the CS5 tools at no extra cost =]
 
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