Yea, I defiantly agree with you on that. I am wanting to build my own system eventually, but thats a maybe. I would defiantly build a very nice powerful system. And if I do need a video input, I can always capture off of the firewire bus. Even my built in isight works! (I have been playing around with that just messing around and it is fun)

I have been messing with all the latest versions on my Macbook pro, and have yet to run into anything that has caused it to mess up. And it has been fast just messing with the effects.

One of the things I am looking to do for the first show is just play back 3 different media clips that are less then 20 minutes long each independently. They also want a logo over layed that is "dimable" which will replace a gobo and s4 fixture. They also have LED's around the room that sync with the video. They have the leds sync with the video so when the video clip changes, the lights do as well. Both of the outputs will be identical content wise, but one of the outputs has to be scaled to fit something like a picture frame and the other has to rotate 90 degrees to fit on a vertically oriented plasma display. Thats no problem with catalyst. And it shouldn't be very process hogging since it is only one media clip playing at a time.