[Gollogly]

I am currently trying to decied what to buy.

Portablity is nice
I have an Exteral Monitor
Budget: Less is More. But i can afford a MBP
Application: Heavy Video editing. And School work (In Art BA)
Must have by next week

campus resources: Avid/FCP/Motion/Shake Work Stations they are all G5's

I know the MacBook can run FCP just loses in render time, Is this like editing on a G5 when you have 4 complex filters or is this, I put a crossfade in and i have to render. because if i can run Soundtrack Pro and FCP very well i can use my small uses of motion and shake in a lab.

It is worth the extra 1000 on a student budget just to get the pro so that I have a bigger screen and a 256 vid card. Will final cut be upgrading to use a non intergated graphics chip?


Thanks a bunch.

Mike

[wulf]

Originally Posted by Gollogly 

I am currently trying to decied what to buy.
I know the MacBook can run FCP just loses in render time, Is this like editing on a G5 when you have 4 complex filters or is this, I put a crossfade in and i have to render. because if i can run Soundtrack Pro and FCP very well i can use my small uses of motion and shake in a lab.

I have a first-gen MacBook and yes, it runs FCP studio pretty well, considering. Render times are actually not bad compared to older G5's; for cutting DV and doing audio the MacBook works very well. Simple stuff will play realtime as you would expect, using RT Extreme. Obviously once you get into multi-stream or uncompressed video, the bandwidth and disk speeds available on G5s come into play and so the gap widens in performance.

Clearly Motion suffers from not having a decent graphics card and so you don't get a lot of real-time previewing, but it's OK for doing little comps, motion text, etc. Shake is not massively GPU-enhanced so, again, it's OK for bits and pieces. Of course if you want to do real heavy lifting you are going to want to use a workstation whether that's G5 or Mac Pro.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm a freelance editor and use G5s every day (starting to see Mac Pros in a couple of places), but I carry my MacBook around because some places I go don't have the full Final Cut Studio suite, or don't have Shake (or any number of other little tools I have on the 'Book).

I was trying to work out how to afford a MBP because I assumed the MB wouldn't run Motion at all. When I realised it did, I got one straight away and I'm very happy with it. The new ones are even better value.

You have to be realistic, it's not going to match a workstation (even an older G5) in all areas, but for general work (especially DV-based) it's really quite capable.

PS. Somewhere on the web there are rendering benchmarks for the original MBs vs. G5s. I don't have the link to hand but they make very interesting reading, and were one of the things that convinced me to get the Mac Book in the first place.