[Jake Keller]

Yes, I’m pretty excited to check it out after messing around with it at the store for a bit. If I don’t sell and get the iMac, I’ll be grabbing up one of the retina Cinema Displays when they decide to show up, but any LED monitor like my Samsung is fine for now.

One thing that dawned on me though is a Thunderbolt drive vs. the internal SSD and what to edit off of. I’m not sure about the technicalities, but I know editing off of your internal is bad because it has to defrag the information and depending on the size of your material you will want a faster read/write speed. Is this the same with SSD’s, or can I edit right off of the internal drive? Otherwise, I’m thinking of buying one of the La Cie little big disks, though they’re quite expensive.

However, the starting 256gb is a small amount of space too so I would need to upgrade to 512gb, partition the SSD, and then edit off one of the partitions. I read its more stable to work off of multiple internal drives instead of just your boot drive. The SSD upgrade is $500 to 512gb and the la cie thunderbolt is $399 @ 1TB, but it’s not an SSD. Hm. I guess more space vs. faster performance is the question here haha. Sorry for prolonging the conversation, but I want to make sure I’m on the right page as technology continues to advance here.

Thanks again for your help. I’m eager to optimize my workflow with the new tools and organization in FCPX. So far, using it on a current project at work has proved to be great.

-Jake

[Jake Keller]

Thanks for the reply Rick. Very helpful response since it helped me with thinking about it more so. Also, I was unaware that the 650M in the rMBP supported CUDA, and this is a huge selling point for the future.

A larger iMac screen does sound appealing, but I do think I would have buyer’s remorse this year, strictly due to the upgraded CPU’s (Ivy Bridge) coming with the iMac refresh. The 1080p playback is definitely worthwhile, and I think while working on the project I’ll set my viewer to the rMBP display for doing color correction while using my samsung px2370 as the primary monitor. The other way around will be fine too for cutting on the timeline. I don’t know if this is possible, but we could use the rMBP display as our on-site monitor through connecting HDMI (mk3) to HDMI (rMBP). Never tried something like that before ever. Anyone tried this yet? Also, doing data and dumping footage on location will be beneficial as well.

Well, you’ve helped me solidify a decision and I think I’ll be happy with the rMBP until the supposed iMac refresh. This way, if I do sell the rMBP I’ll probably be able to pay off the iMac and keep a little of the remaining money for upgrades/accessories too. It might be hard to part with the display though after looking at it for so long :p

Thanks so much for your suggestions and thought-provoking advice.

-Jake