thinking about doing the switch

Hey guys, I am new to the Forum and I joined cause I am looking for answers....
Been a PC user all my life and that is where I do all my work...
Animation..
Editing...
Photoshop...
etc.

I keep hearing that MAC is the way to go but I need to be able to work on the go. Would a 15 inch MBPro be suitable for me to be able to run apps like..

Maya2011, Adobe Master Collection CS5: Maily using After Effects and Premiere.

Please be honest, I just don't want to go out and spend the amount of money that a MAC cost and then find out that I will be struggling with it.

Thank you for your time.

My 2 year old 15 inch MBP runs the full suite of Final Cut Studio applications and dozens of others without a hitch. When I had Adobe CSS it worked great too. What kinds of struggles are you afraid of having? It will take a little time to get the hang of OS X but that's all I can really think of and it's certainly not a permanent issue. Oh, btw it's not MAC, it's just Mac.

Hey Oneronaut, D)

First of all, I apologize to the Million of Mac Users out there for my mistake in spelling..... lol

my main concern is the ability of the unit supporting video editing through premiere and post production work from after effects. These two take up alot of power.

I also work with Maya and Zbrush so I am concern on the performance once I get into large files.

My plan is to get the low end model of the 15inch family and upgrade the hard drive to a 500gb 7200rpm hard drive...
and just upping the RAM all the way to 8GB's.

That's pretty much what I did except my model won't take 8GB. With a faster drive and more memory, I don't see you having any trouble at all. The MBP is designed to be used for such processor intensive work. The dual graphics card helps a lot. As long as you get an external hard drive to use as your scratch disk, you should be fine.

starting vices

Scratch Disk? I keep hearing that term around. (pardon my ignorance) Is that's the external drive where the footage is been read from?
So I should get one that is firewire 800, correct?

the reason why I am asking is because, I have always used my desktop at home to do all that type of work and I usually have two internal drives.
one for OS and software and such..
the other for videos and images..

btw...thank you for taking the time to answer.

You're partially right. Scratch disk refers to any drive where media files are stored. If you have mostly small files that will be erased soon, you could conceivably use your startup disk as the scratch disk. Most of the time though people use external hard drives, but if you have multiple internal drives, that works too. If you're going to get a MBP, you'll need an external. Not sure when you'd need to set up a RAID system, but I haven't needed to worry about that many internal drives yet.

I love answering questions about stuff I know about. I'm planning a series of tutorials about FCP so if you ever decide to give that a try, let me know and I'll answer your questions with a video!

Oh yeah, the 15 inch MBP has a firewire 800 port, though I'm not sure how you're supposed to connect a firewire camera at the same time to get taped footage from the camera to the external drive. You'll probably need a firewire hub. If you're using tapeless media, it might not be a problem.

Most likely, I will be transferring the footage to the main HD and then transferring it to the external. I don't know if that would cause any issues.

From what I can tell it shouldn't be a problem. It's when your HD has to keep reading big files that can muck things up. Good luck!