Recommended Software/Hardware

Often students and parents ask about equipment needed to do Freestyle work at home. The list below is not required but for those families that can afford it, here is what we use at Freestyle.

All Freestyle students use Adobe CS6 (not CS5.5 or CS5) Design or Web Premium - student prices for PC or Mac (Acrobat Pro, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop Extended, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and Bridge) for both PC and Mac. All students also use digital drawing pads (we use 6x8 pads) and SLR cameras (we use Canon Rebel XTs, 30Ds and 5Ds)
Senior students also use Adobe After Effects Professional CS6 NOT CS5.5 nor CS5 (not included with Design Premium bundle, After Effects CS5 for Film students, After Effects CS4 for WebAudio students) for both PC and Mac
Film students also use Apple Final Cut Pro X and FCP 6 (NOT FCP7 all require a Mac computer). Final Cut Pro is not "backwards compatible"; meaning, you are not able to edit one project in different versions of FCP - so to work on a FCP file both at home and at school, you MUST have FCP X or FCP 6. Also, film students collaborate on projects - only one or two projects are solo ventures. For that reason, it's important to keep film work on campus where you and your partner have equal access to the FCP and media files. For film footage storage, an external Firewire 800 hard drive 250+ GB is recommended
Both Film and WebAudio students use Apple Garageband - requires a Mac computer
WebAudio students also use Digidesign Pro Tools 10 (not 8 or 9), MBox 2, Propellerhead Reason 5 and external flash memory card for file transfer to/from home - 16 GB is sufficient, all available for both PC and Mac
For either PC or Mac computers, the above applications work best with 2 GB or more of RAM. Any Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook or iMac running Mac OS 10.6+. The Apple Education Store has some deals for students. Speak to Mr. Florendo about a PC recommendation.
Students can also sign-up and use lynda.com for video based tutorials