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MA / MFA Film & Media Arts Equipment List

REQUIRED
Adobe Premiere Pro:听Sign up听with your american.edu email address for the student discount.

RECOMMENDED听

Storage:

Hard drives are used throughout the program, especially in production and editing courses. To start, it鈥檚 a good idea to have a 2 to 4 TB drive. SSD鈥檚 are preferred over regular hard drives because they are faster and more durable. For Bootcamp in the summer a small drive is all you need.

When you get into production in the fall, you will want to follow professional best practices. You鈥檒l want at least two places to store your original media. That can be on two hard drives, a hard drive and the cloud, or just the cloud so long as you are sure that cloud storage is guaranteed. A third source (hard drive) will be used for editing your projects. That one should be the fastest SSD that you can afford.

Laptops:听

Laptops for in-class and home use are recommended. We are a MacBook Pro house, but Adobe鈥檚 apps are great on PCs and Macs. There are several things to keep in mind when looking at laptops:

  • Internal storage: You鈥檒l need at least 1 TB of storage for apps and files.
  • Memory and graphics cards:听Spend as much as you can on more memory and on the chips themselves. Get the fastest and most robust chip that you can afford. This will save you so much time in postproduction and transferring time. The faster the external SSD hard drive and the internal computer hard drive, the better off you will be. For MacBooks, we don鈥檛 recommend the Air as it has a combined graphics and processing chip, which may slow you down.
  • Screen size:听Get what鈥檚 right for you. Larger is heavier and more expensive but a larger screen makes editing and fine work in other apps easier.
  • Thumb drive:听It鈥檚 a good idea to have a small thumb drive to store your project backups on. You don鈥檛 want to store the backups on the same drive as your working project.听

*Additional information: We have editing labs in McKinley that you can use for editing and other Adobe Suite apps. We also have editing suites in MPC (Media Production Center).

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Have questions?

If you have any questions, contact SOC Techline at soctechline@american.edu or call the Tech line at 202-885-3570.