Thought I would drop my 2 cents worth. The way she has her emac speced out, it is more then adequate to run Final Cut Express 2. I guess it would depend on what program she is running she first called it Final Cut Express 2 then Final Cut Pro, there is a big difference.
I used to run a media education department and we ran 5 similarly speced emacs, with Final Cut Express 2, Photoshop CS and Intuos 2 tablets. 250 Lacie firewire drives. During the summers those emacs would run for at least 10 hours a day, and my students would be using them non stop. Never had a failure, crash etc. My only problem was when I failed to format one of the hardrives and even though media could be saved and seen it could not be recovered or opened.
From what Maria is saying I am guessing she has 3 problems.
1.) She is running out of hardrive space. If her finished project is 2 1/2 hours long and under ideal conditions of 1 min = 3 min raw. That still works out to about 7 1/2 hours of raw footage that works about 97 gig of hard drive space. her drive is only 80 gig.
2.) It sounds like the second problem she maybe facing is that she is trying to open up FCE in iDVD. FCE is not iMovie. If I remeber correctly you need to export out from FCE then bring it back into iDVD.
3.) Use the external. Who ever told you not to use the external does not know what they are talking about. Unless the firewire drive is a 5400 rpm. If its a 7200 rpm there should be no problems.
IMHO one of the main reasons people should look at macs is if you are serious about creating movies. Final Cut Express makes a great training tool for the price and if you master FCE, then making a jump to Final Cut Pro is easy. Pinnacle may have a simpler workflow but it is not considered as even a "semi-pro" program. You want to make movies mac is the most cost effective computer.
I have been seriously thinking about getting a Mac lately, because I really like its operating system and its supposed to have better hardware. But before, I was hesitant to do that, since you couldn't run as much software on it as you could on Windows PCs. However, now that they released Macs with OS X on Intel processors, I could just use boot camp to install a Windows partition on the Mac as well. But when I checked the Apple website, I checked the prices for their laptops, and they are all so expensive. Many people say that Macs are much cheaper in comparison to pc's, but I don't see how that's true. I was mainly looking for a Pentium Core Duo processor at 2.0 ghz, around 100 gb HD, 2 GB RAM, and DVD RW among other specifications. Are there any other sellers or any places where I can find Mac's that are cheaper?

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