Dear Mac users,

I am a PC user and know very little (nothing) about Mac products. I understand that Mac products are better for picture and video and sound editing than PC products. I am interested in trying my hand at a youtube channel and want to upload helpful videos to teach skills I do. I have bought an Iphone 4 and want to get a Macbook? or Ipad to be able to edit the video and I have a few questions I could use some help with...

Should I upgrade the IOS for free to a more current IOS?

I want to do this on the cheap to start with, so I will be buying an older model unit. In your opinion, what Mac product should I use for the video editing?

What software would you recommend for video editing?

Any other tips you think I would find helpful

Thank you,
Todd

For whatever it's worth:

I'm a PC guy but i was talking with one of my customers a couple of weeks ago. He prefers MAC and one of his favorite things to do is to do video editing. He's even got a couple of youtube videos out. We didn't go into details but he said something that stuck with me. He was saying that he spent over 1,000.00$ to get a 1 TB hard drive when they first came out.

My guess would be that you would need a fair amount of storage on your hard drive and some fairly beefy hardware for that kind of work. Maybe look for a decent quad core processor and a higher end graphics card ?

Macs have their software problems just as pc's do. Overall the Mac hardware is better than a pc but they cost more too. Older Macs pretty much used the same processors, hard drives, and memory speeds as their PC cousins because that's what was available for tech at the time.

If you're looking to do it on the cheap have you thought about picking up a gaming rig that's about three or four years old ?

The only reason i mentioned it is because i had one given to me last month. It took awhile to track down the memory leakage but once it was sorted out the machine turned out to be a real workhorse. Far and away better than any of the consumer grade PC's or Macs that i've worked on before.

I'd go with something like this:

MacBook Pro 13 Core i5 2012 500GB 8GB Loaded Suite CS6 Finalcut Logic Photoshop | eBay

An older mac with Final Cut Pro. You DO NOT want to try edit video on an Ipad.

The downside to older macs is they are not compatible with an Iphone. So if you plan on shooting video with the Iphone you wont be able to just plug your Iphone into an older Mac.
The way I work around that is to have a Win 10 computer with Itunes, then pull your video off the phone with that.

Then you can network the Win 10 machine and the older Mac and pull the video over to your Mac that way.

I'm still using a very ancient G5 to edit video. It's so old I can't even get on YouTube with it. I make my videos, then export them to the Win 10 computer then upload them from there.

Where there is a will there is a way.

Thanks for the input. I will ditch the idea about the ipad. I will look for Macbooks. pj, will the macs not even connect to icloud to pic up the video, and is the Finalcut photoshop the video editing software I should look for?

Now, onto new items. As it seems, I was able to pick up another working iphone at a garage sale this morning for $15. I think it is a newer phone than the one I just bought off the bay (I wish I had found this last week!). Turns out it is an ATT phone. Doesn't really matter, I was not planning to use it as a mobile phone anyway.

Well, I took a look on CL and I am about here... Apple MacBook laptop Core 2 great shape , Camera, WiFi To start I am not really looking to make feature length movies, I just want to learn some about working with videos. I am not about to dump a ton of money into this to get a laptop computer I have no hope of understanding. $600 I care about, $80 I can throw into the trash and move on with my life.

$600 IS cheap when you are talking about video equipment. Sorry guess I didn't understand what kind of budget you were talking about.

Here is the issue with these old Macs... You have to match the OS with the version of Final Cut Pro. Then you have to match THAT with the correct version of Quicktime. It's kind of a mess.

If you just want to try some basic stuff, maybe save your $80 and try Windows Movie Maker. I've never tried it, but it may do what you are looking to do.

Another option is the Linux OS. There are some pretty cool looking video editing programs available for free on that OS. Again I haven't played with those either.

I learn a great deal from watching youtube videos and I would suggest you start there. Mike