FCP X on a MacBook Air

[Andy Field]

Not a macbook air but on a Macbook Pro Retina…which is really a souped up macbook air (SSD) FCPX and FCP 7 rocks on this machine – super fast

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852

[Darren Roark]

I have on an i5 13″ with 4GB RAM. It works really well if you have fast storage. I was using a Seagate 4TB thunderbolt drive. It gets about 120 MBs.

I do turn rendering off and use proxy media when I can. I now have a retina MBP now.

The new Haswell chip’s GPU is supposed to compare with many a curent discrete one.

[Bret Williams]

Good golly man get yourself to Amazon and buy some RAM already. 16 gigs would cost you like $70.

[Bret Williams]

My bad, when I bought this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0076W9Q5A/ref=ox_ya_os_product back in November it was $83. Now it’s $128! Still I’d get it.

[Darren Roark]

This is the same sage advice I give to all those dying breeds of portable mac users who can do such things. On a 2011 MB Air, you are stuck with what the Apple guardians gave you at purchase.

[Bret Williams]

Ah. When you said 13″ i5 I read it as you were referring to the MacBook Pro. Yup. That’s the main reason we didn’t buy an air. We bought the $1100 MacBook Pro i5 and stuck the 16gigs in it. Mainly my wife’s work machine, but we take it to shoots and such and edit a little in the field. Works great. I love the fact that it’s the last breed that has ethernet, FW800, USB3, Thunderbolt, and a DVD Burner. With my iMacs, I either got USB2, TB, FW800 & Burner, OR USB3, TB and no burner. The burner and FW800 would have been nice on latest iMacs.

[Darren Roark]

Brett, I must say I am a big fan of your posts, you have a great open mind for the changes we are all facing.

And as a note of respect to you, my wife tells me constantly that I can’t explain things for crap. Except she didn’t say crap.

It’s funny how Apple has for the past ten years been the tech version of Richard Simmon’s Deal a Meal. “You can have this, or give up that in your portable edit system…”

I’d watch that ad.

[Bret Williams]

Thanks! Posting here can certainly be an addiction. I don’t really know why. I come here looking to learn stuff but then end up just talking shop, or sh!t. MacRumors is pretty addictive too. But I rarely post there.

[Richard Jacana]

I have a top of the range 2011 i7 Air with 8Gb of memory and the 4000 card. I can only compare it to my Mini with same processor but with the optional MD Radeon HD 6630M 256 MB card. For small projects it runs fine, I can even play original AVCHD footage encoded at 130Mbps. Running some comparison I did notice for some things the Air was half a quick as the mini e.g. add a “rain effect” took 2x on the Air so I assume the the Air was not using the 4000 with Open CL or something like that but the Mini was. Important is the same and the Air has a quicker SSD than the cheap SSD in the Mini. I was able to edit a poject with 1200 clips on both machines but I recall the Mini being a little faster to render thumbnails – used the same external TB drive that held the project with 1200 events.

I’d get the newest Air as the graphics card rocks now and uses more memory I think – don’t forget the card grabs memory from our Ram. Don’t get 4gb of Ram, get 8Gb and and i5 supposedly doesn’t have same mojo that the i7 has for stuff like video and hyper-threading if the app supports it.