• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Compatibility, speed & work arounds – advice needed

  Posted by Olly Lawer on December 5, 2011 at 4:55 pm

  OK. In a nutshell.

  I am getting render times (converting to H.264 for web, 8000kbps, 720×1280) of about 25 minutes with my current Macbook Pro (3 min video) – 4GB ram. Without doing anything else with the machine. Although this latest 3 min vid is taking over 50 minutes!!

  First question – how much can I reasonably expect this time to reduce to with:

  A. 21.5-inch: 2.5GHz
  2.5GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
  1920 x 1080 resolution
  4GB (two 2GB) memory
  500GB hard drive1
  AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB

  – – – OR – – –
  B. 15-inch: 2.2 GHz
  2.2GHz quad-core
  Intel Core i7
  4GB 1333MHz
  500GB 5400-rpm1
  Intel HD Graphics 3000
  AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB GDDR5
  Built-in battery (7 hours)2

  Am I going to buy myself much time?

  – – –

  Secondly I would like to keep my existing MacBook Pro. Installed on this machine I have FCP 6. I regularly edit as I own a production company. I cannot upgrade to Lion as it does not support FCP 6.

  I could upgrade to FCP 7 (which would cost a fortune and still would only provide one licence) or FCP 10. The later is attractive, but looking at Apple’s Specs, I meet all the specs on my MacBook bar the graphics card. I have a GL Graphics Card (GeForce 8600M GT) but for some reason this is excluded from the list of acceptable graphic cards.

  So…the possibilities are:

  A. Get a iMac. Downgrade it to Snow Leopard. Back up from my Time Machine so FCP is now on both machines. Is this even possible? Since the license will only cover one machine?

  B. Get a iMac. Keep as Lion and buy FCP 10. Upgrade MacBook to Lion, but partition the drive with Snow Leopard so I can still have FCP 6. Download FCP 10 to my MacBook and hope it works even though my graphics card is not supported (I hear it might). How do I even get FCP 10 on my MacBook? Will it tell me I cannot install it because it recognises I don’t have the right graphics card?

  C. Get a MacBook Pro. Do all the above, but if it doesn’t work, sell my old MacBook Pro.

  – – –

  Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

  Olly Lawer

  Olly Lawer replied 14 years, 9 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
• 0 Replies

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