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Q. What equipment do you need?
A. Tons. And none of it is cheap either.
As much as you can obtain (legally). A lot of companies run special developer purchase schemes. Registration as a developer is usually all that is required. Seek these deals out and maximise the benefits. Pretty much the same equipment requirements apply whether you are operating from home or from an office with colleagues. Your business may be strictly desktop based or it may be in shared and distributed systems. To develop software for corporate distributed systems, you are going to have to consider the more industrial strength systems such as UNIX based Sun, IBM, HP and of course Silicon Graphics systems. Windows NT systems may be a viable alternative or you may simply consider them to be another delivery platform. Most of your asset creation will likely be done on a Macintosh and some may take place on a PC. This being the case, choose the largest and most powerful model you can afford. The benefit will come in the time you save and will offset the initial higher cost.
Equip your machines with as much memory and disk space as you can. 128 Mbytes is an absolute minimum these says and another 128 Mbytes makes all the difference when you are using Photoshop. If you plan to develop video assets, 20 Gbytes is a practical minimum. Although your target platform may well be an 640x480x8 bit display, having a larger screen and 16 or 24 bit colour will help a lot but remember to test your art and pages at the finished resolution and screen depth. Also be aware of the different colour display artefacts that can be introduced when you squash the art down or move it to another platform.
Bear in mind that a scanner will be very useful and of course, you will need a CD-Recorder. Well, you don’t really need it but it’s more convenient than sending your hard disk through the post.
For peripheral equipment, you may find it helpful to have a video digitiser in an A/V equipped machine. Make sure that it has sufficient memory and fast and large disks. You may need to be able to play laser disks and also S-VHS quality video. BetaCam-SP is expensive but just having a compatible player may offset the hire fees if you digitise a lot of material from that kind of source. Whether you support any other video formats depends on your client base and I could presently justify several other formats based on work I would like to do in the next year or so.
Audio digitising would dictate the availability of a good quality cassette transport and also a DAT player/recorder. If you plan to originate audio media, you may want to invest in more sophisticated (home studio grade) rack mounted and modular units. Compressors, DSP’s, samplers, MIDI equipment and hard disk recorders may all be useful.
You may yet get some very oddball source material so having access to slide and movie film transcription services or equipment might be helpful from time to time.
Basically, gather any and all media related equipment you get the opportunity to get hold of. Hiring expensive equipment may be an option but if you need it for more than about 6 months, you will be better off buying it.
Don’t forget backup facilities. Tape cartridges are good for capacity but poor for access. I use 1.3 Gbyte MO cartridges for most of my backups these days. They are generally big enough to hold all the working data for a modestly sized project. Each side is roughly the capacity of a CD-ROM so they are useful medium to use for building a beta version of the products.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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