Macbook (not pro) and Final Cut Studio

[Steve Eisen]

It all depends on wht you want to do. To do basic editing, it is fine. The work I do, it would not stand a chance.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Director-At-Large
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Jonathan White]

Thanks for the advice. I wonder could you give me a bit more detail. I’m asking this question as I’m advising
a student on her purchase and I know money is tight. I’ve seen benchmarks on a couple of web sites that show the macbook to be marginally slower in most areas and (believe it or not!) a bit faster in some. 6 seconds extra on colour correcting a 1 min clip isn’t going to really matter to her.

Is there anything she can’t do or that’s so painully slow to be unfeasible? I know the smaller screen will be a nusiance but she plans to plug into a larger screen at home.

Thanks again for your help.

Johnny

[Jonathan White]

Thanks for the advice. I wonder could you give me a bit more detail. I’m asking this question as I’m advising
a student on her purchase and I know money is tight. I’ve seen benchmarks on a couple of web sites that show the macbook to be marginally slower in most areas and (believe it or not!) a bit faster in some. 6 seconds extra on colour correcting a 1 min clip isn’t going to really matter to her.

Is there anything she can’t do or that’s so painully slow to be unfeasible? I know the smaller screen will be a nusiance but she plans to plug into a larger screen at home.

Thanks again for your help.

Johnny

[Sean Oneil]

The problem with it is that it has no high-speed I/O bus for external devices. There’s no Firewire 800, and there’s no Cardbus slots. So you could never add SATA drives or a theoretical Fiberchannel card or anything like that. You’re limited to Firewire400 drives. This is fine for standard-def, DV and offline quality editing. But for Uncompressed editing, this won’t cut it.

[Zak Mussig]

If it’s for a student, and she’s in an all DV environment then this will be fine for her… just encourage her not to cheap out on RAM (that doesn’t necessarily mean pay what Apple asks either). I’m to the point where I wouldn’t buy a MacBook and expect to edit on it beyond a little light DV work for myself, but my first Mac was an 500 MHz iBook G3, and that got me started on FCP. That was 5 years ago now, and Motion would have laughed at that machine ( I doubt it will be too responsive on a MacBook either).

The bottom line is that, if you’re a student, you get what you can, and it gets you through until you need or can get something better. Just don’t do you student the disservice of telling her it will do everything she could ever dream of. If she knows what she’s getting, and it does what she needs to do, at least for the foreseeable future, then there you have it.

Zak

[David42]

For light duty field work, or student work, I would go with MacBook over the Pro, and any spend leftover budget on max memory (which helps compensate for the lite graphics card), ext keyboard and trackball, second screen, FW hard drive, all the stuff you might want or need with a MacBook Pro. The MB is way better than a PB 4 Titanium, which is supported for FCP by Apple. For basic I/O, edit, and tanscode to DVD, MB works, and is supported for that use with consumer aps.

While the caveats listed by Mr. White are true to the best of my knowledge, a white Mabook worked fine for me on a conference job. I captured live DV from the Imag dv deck, was moved to the edit room, hooked up to my screen and keyboard and editing by the time the crowd cleared.

Daisy-chaining the capture cam or FW deck on the second port of a Lacie FW drive was no problem at DV data rates. A FW hub is another option, sorry I can’t give you the model we used, but it was one aquired 3 years earlier. Besides IO anc onnectivity issues, MacBook is prone to build up heat. If it was being used outdoors in hot climate to crunch HDV to m2v dvd movies, that might become an issue.

My one advice to MB and pro users is to be sure you are fully shutdown before bagging the beauty, since the fan coming back on in sleep mode will overheat it with the exhaust ports blocked.

[Jeremy Garchow]

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303782

Don’t send in a carpenter without a hammer. Her computer should at least meet the system requirements. With new updates and additions a macbook amateur is going to be out of touch for fcp really soon.

Have her get a Pro. In a few months she won’t even remember the difference in price.

Jeremy

[Jonathan White]

Thanks to everybody for their help. Guess I’ll point her to this thread and let her make up her own mind..

Johnny