powerbook G4 good choice for FCP?

[Ed Dooley]

I edit occasionally on my 17″ 1.5 PB. Maxing out the RAM is a good idea, upgrading to the 128MB graphics card is also a good idea.
It works fine, until you move over to a G5 2.7 🙂
Ed

[Oxyde]

I do edit on my powerbook 1ghz 768RAM HD fiwire 200.
Depend on what you ant to do. Its no problem but if you use to work on a station you might think about the speed.
Quite slow on a powerbook.
Better max the ram and a 128 graphic card. and firewire 800 , using firewire 400 for deck.
you could have nice workflow with this config but if you have to cut some TVC and client is in a hurry, prefer a station.
At work I’m running a G4 DUAL CPU 1GHZ 1G RAM and a RAId 0 scsi and its twice faster.

U still can make RT with your powerbook and if you dont have to much software or other stuff on your machine it should be fast enough to produce good professional work.

Anyway i do all my freelance job on my powerbook and i bought a pc to encode file to mpeg2 in batch list or render AE files so i could keep working by the time. Well i’m living in china and a PC is about 4OO EURO , so this is why.

hope that helps.

cheers

[Bill]

oxyde i maybe mistaken but running a fw800 drive and your deck off the fw400 at the sametime slows the system down quite a bit since the fw800 and fw400 share the same bus therefore the fw800 actually drops to fw400. you should invest in a pci/fw card. this seperates the devices allowing the drive to utilize fw 800.

[Kevin Monahan]

[bill] “ou should invest in a pci/fw card. this seperates the devices allowing the drive to utilize fw 800.”

Bill has a good point, however, for the powerbook, it’s actually a PCMCIA card. A PCI card would go into a tower. Your deck and external drive will then be on a separate bus.

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com

[Ed Dooley]

We have the LaCie FW800 cardbus card because AJA recommends it. It works fine.
Ed

[Mitchji]

Hi,

Would a G5 iMac with the iLugger bag work for you?

https://www.luggerbags.com/G5.htm
“See how you can go from desk to bag in 30 seconds. See how you can go from desk to bag in 30 seconds.”

“OK, we all wanted a G5 Powerbook… but it doesn’t look like they are going to make one for a while…. so make your G5 iMac portable! After all, its only 2 inches thick, weighs 18 lbs & has a dazzling display nicer than any notebook!”

A friend who uses one for FCP had this to say:
” just got my iMac today – infinitely faster than any powerbook I could have bought at three times the cost. I got the cheapest I could find: a new 1.6gHz 17″ with a CDRW/DVD and 256 RAM on eBay. I upgraded to 1GB RAM and got the iLugger bag.

[Raju Bhai]

Thank u for your responses. I will be editing music videos and it sounds like fom the responses I’ve been getting that the powerbook is an OK choice but not a great choice. I will be sacrificing alot of editing power by going with it. But I may still choose the PowerBook over other options even though it’s really just a toy for novices who like to play around with family albums and make little home movies and not made for a serious editor like myself. and the reason i will choose the PowerBook is because I really need the mobility.
Does anybody know if there are portable pocket drives that would be a good solution to edit off of. I will use an extrenal drive as the scratch disk since I hear it’s better to use a different drive to do the editing from the one where you have all the applications installed. Any thoughts? Are there any compact drives that are reliable for this sort of work? What about flash drives/pen drives, etc?

[Oxyde]

you right bill, thanks for remind it. i never took care of it even if my friends told me abouy coz its working fine and most of the time i prefer grab footage from a station and use the disc (i think its more good in term of continuous data rate).
I never tried with a card. is it still ok, no drop, trouble grabbing footage?

If its ok i willdefinitely buy a card an dont bother carry the disc anymore

cheers