Will a Mac Mini be ok for....

Meds

Meds

Meds

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Hi Chaps,

Quick question if you will, could someone tell me if the 2.26ghz Mac Mini is capable of running Office and Final Cut??

I was thinking of buying one for the old man, all he uses his computer for is:

Internet
Minimal Office
Video Editing (editing home made videos of the grand children etc...) He has a HD camera.

So would the entry level Mac Mini be ok for those tasks?

THanks dudes

Meds
 
Yes, including HD.

/me looks at Mac Mini being used to edit HD and smiles sweetly
 
Thanks Stuport and Feek, and thanks for the quick response.

Im just sick and tired of having to fix the mans PC every 2 weeks cause he has spyware or a virus. No matter what I do he always gets them....

He's 61 btw.


I assume he can also convert the edited videos into DVD's etc :)
When I was looking at the spec I was worried about the 9400m
 
Meds said:
Am I rightin assuming that you guys are using final cut for your editing?
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I don't personally but I was a trainer with Apple for quite some time and learned first hand what various Macs are capable of - to my initial surprise if I'm honest. The trainers I worked with who taught Final Cut had customers who used all sorts of machines including Minis or various vintages, G5 iMacs, etc etc.

The main thing on a boggo 2.26 Mac Mini that could be a concern is the small hard drive, but if your dad's aware of it and moves old footage to an external drive or deletes it, he'll see no problems. If he wants to store all of his HD imported footage on the machine's drive he'll hit the wall storage-wise quite quickly if he shoots a lot of footage.

Edit: in fact my personal experience of using Final Cut (hamfistedly) was training myself in it (or rather attempting to, I never got far) on a 2ghz iMac with onboard graphics and 2gb of RAM, so actually a slower machine than the Mini you're talking about. And in all honesty it was just dandy.
 
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Thanks for the info man. Outta curiosiy what software do you guys use for your video editing needs.?
 
Meds said:
Thanks for the info man. Outta curiosiy what software do you guys use for your video editing needs.?
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Personally? iMovie. Yes it's consumer level, but in the consumer arena it is absolutely exceptionally good software, especially since the '09 update which any new mac will have installed. '06 was quite powerful but buggy and a little user unfriendly, '08 was fantastically easy but a little less powerful (ok, quite a lot less powerful for a lot of people), '09 in my opinion strikes an excellent balance.

Consider iMovie '09 will be on the Mac as a freebie, I would definitely recommend giving it a good crack of the whip before shelling out for Final Cut. Final Cut is very powerful but obviously much more complex and considerably harder to use than iMovie, and iMovie can do pretty much everything your hobby level video editor could reasonably ask of it.

Give it a good punt and you'll be pleasantly surprised, I'm sure. It's good software - exceptional when you consider it's effectively free.
 
I think it's decided. I will grab him of those:)
thanks all for the advice.

I assume nows an ok time to purchase one. No imminent updAte or anything.

I might let him have a whirl on my MacBook pro when that arrives and see how he gets on with iMovies.

But I guess if he don't like the macmini I could always use it as a media server or something.
 
I'm a young man who uses his Mac Mini 2.26ghz as his main machine and absolutley loves its capability! :D
 
Meds said:
When I was looking at the spec I was worried about the 9400m
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They're a very capable little machine. I use a 2GHz version (with 4GB of RAM) as my main desktop machine. The much faster PC doesn't get a look in unless I'm gaming.

The 9400 is fine for anything but playing demanding games at high resolutions. It's arguably as fast as the graphics cards fitted to the pro machines a couple of years ago. It's multitudes quicker than the awful Intel GMA graphics fitted to the earlier minis.
 
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