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FCP on souped up Macbook or Mac Pro £2000 budget
Hi guys,
Firstly apologies for posting a similar question to several others already in existence (I have read many) however I have some specific requirements that go beyond basic timeline editing, so…
Tomorrow I will spend up to £2000 pounds of my hard earned cash on a Mac system to run FCP studio (excluding software). I wish to make a 40 – 60 min instructional DVD of a particular martial art. Scenes will need brightening, colours balanced and I want to add overlays (I dont know the technical term) of moving arrows, effects and pop-ups to make a really engaging, original, learning resource. Then I will make more, simpler DVDs, eventually I want to work in HD. Possibly I can make a full-time career out of this, to do it right it needs to render workably fast. I can time-budget a month full-time for the first project.
Question:
1.)Is a Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4MB RAM fast enough? I can get external hard drives later.
2.) Or will I be much better off with a new 2.66GHz Quad-Core with Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor. Will the 4 cores be so much faster?Thanks in advance and congrats on this forum it is an amazing resource.
Regards, Andy
Andy Eadie
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1 Reply
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Hey Andy,
The refurbed MBP will be fine for your needs if you can handle working on a relatively small screen all of the time. I would suggest getting an external monitor if you are looking to do any major colour corrections or intricate effects.
As your final output is DVD PAL or NTSC, a MBP will handle the whole workflow without much of a problem. Render times for standard definition video are more than acceptable on a MBP.
I have an Intel 2.4Ghz MBP with 4GB RAM and have cut endless PAL and DVCPro HD projects without much fuss at all. Even the render times on graded and effected DVCProHD were better than I hoped for.
You will need a third party piece of kit for your MBP to be able to ingest the HD footage; a device such as the AJA I/O HD or a P2 store etc, depending on the HD flavor. If you are only considering HDV, the only extra kit required is an HDV Camera/Deck connected via Firewire.However, if you have money to buy a Quadcore Mac Pro, your options open up a great deal. MBPs you can upgrade a little, MacPros can be upgraded a lot and therefore have a much longer shelf life.
All the best,
SimonIs it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??
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