You Mac people make me crazy. I use a Dual G4 Final Cut system at work,
however I could not afford the big outlay of capital required to have the same at home.
Instead I put together a PIII sytem that is of higher quality for one tenth (1/10) the cost of the
Mac system. Premiere 6 has one big advantage, you can use a very inexpesive capture card
to achieve identical results. With a little research, I was able to purchase a new PIII box with 60GB
storage for $600 (ebay), a used Canon Optura for $600 (ebay), a Firewire capture card for $40 (ebay),
a 19" Hitachi monitor for $160 (ebay), 512MB SDRAM for $80 and Premiere 6 and After Effects 5 PB for $500 (ebay).
Total cost of mini DV system $1980. (Less than cost of a slim G4). The Optura allows you to use any TV as a playback monitor,
the features in the Adobe software are as good or better than Final Cut and play nice with Photoshop, Illustrator,
etc. I routinely produce broadcast quality video that actually is superior to that off the G4 and it renders twice as fast.