imac for editing hd?

[noa]

Hi all,
first post here and hoping to get some good advise.
Now I"m a wedding videographer living in Belgium, for the past years I allways have been a windows user working with premiere pro to get my editing business done. I never saw a reason to switch to a mac because my pc was dedicated to editing only, didn't have a firewall or virusscanner and was tweaked to handle editing tasks without any problems. Now by the end of this year I'm switching to working with HD and final cut studio 2 really drew my attention, the previews I saw on on the apple site looked very promising.

I'm really thinking about getting a mac, mainly for editing purposes but I have to make a good choice before I would make a large investment, and large it will be, a new hd camera, a new pc or mac and new editing software. That's why I'm not sure wether to go for an imac or macpro.
A mac pro would be a perfect editing base but for me it's a bit expensive, does anyone here have experience how an imac 17"- 2ghz or a 20" 2,16ghz handles hd material? Especially if a dedicated external drive is used to capture and edit the hd footage on?

The imac is in a pricerange I can afford together with fcp studio 2, I"m just a bit concerned wehter it can take heavy duty work like hours of rendering and so on.

Someone any advice?

 

[surfwax95]

I just bought a 20" iMac Core2Duo which is faster than my PowerMac G5 which handles High Definition footage just fine.

For what it's worth.

 

[gilesjuk]

iMacs have only one space for a hard disk, if you wish to edit a lot of video then you would end up needing external drives.

Mac Pro has 4 disc bays and plenty of expansion, you also get to choose the monitor you want and if the monitor isn't good enough you can simply return it. If your iMac screen isnt right you have to return the whole thing and do without a computer for a while.

 

[bryphotoguy]

If you are going to be using an external drive, I'd get the 20" or 24". I say the 24" for the firewire 800 capabilities. The smaller versions only have firewire 400 (and usb.)
I wouldn't go and get the 17" for video work. If you are doing HD, the videos are going to be larger dimensionally and you will have less room for the toolbars and other editing goodies.
Maybe using dual monitors with a 17" would work, that's if final cut works well with that configuration.
Trying doing a little research in the video editing thread on the forum here.
Bryan