[RGray02]

I am thinking of purchasing an ibook, but I wanted to know some of its capabilities beforehand. This would be a personal machine, part time iMovie maker, maybe some FCP, definitely some After Effects, and most definitely some project builder.

But how good is the iBook at these things? Can it play a divx movie compressed with 640x480 resolution at full screen? Is it a pain to do developments on (if it is hooked to an external monitor)? How does after effects, FCP etc. run on it?

I am not going to use this as a professional machine, but I am trying to see if springing for the TiBook might be worth it.

Thanks

[BannanaFiend]

If you want to use an external monitor, the tiBook may be a better bet. The iBook can only output 1024x768 to external monitors, wheras the ti is good for a monitor of most any size.

The largest divx movies I've played on my iBook 600 mhz are 480x360. Those run quite smoothly. I don't know about 640x480 movies though.

I've not really used those other apps, but my understanding is that you need a G4 for the real time effects in FCP.

Hope this helps.

[redhot_nyc]

iBook is good for text editing, iTunes, and surfing the web. not for FCP

[Stuart Ball]

My 700 (with 384MB RAM) beats my G4 500 desktop for developing in a few respects:
1. It's faster at building (quite incredible when you consider the G4 has 768 Mb and 7200 rpm hard drives)
2. My game runs slightly faster on it (the G4 has a GF2 vid card)
3. I can develop in the garden/car/bath -- anywhere!
4. it has a better screen - my g4 has a Samsung 19" and a Studio display 17"

And as added bonuses:
1. It runs all current games great at reasonable resolutions.
2. It's far smaller than my G4 and has quite a phenomenal battery life.

Cheers,
Stu.

[Macintosh]

To answer the main question, Yes.

[flatcatch]

I'm quite happy with my 700Mhz iBook for general stuff, but even a "little bit" of iMovie will bring the iBook to its knees. Encoding 6 minutes of some of my DV footage to QuickTime (Sorensen 320x240, 15fps, 250 k/sec data rate) took about an hour. In all fairness my footage is almost entirely fast motion so there is a lot of bits to encode there.

I used <a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13366&db=mac" target="_blank">Process Wizard</a> to max out iMovie's priority and lowered the Finder's priority as far as possible. This cut about 20 minutes off the encoding time.

I know the iBook isn't a media machine in any sense of the word so I'm not complaining - I still like it as a cool portable Mac. Anywho, I'm off to wait for my 640x480/24fps encoding of those 6 minutes to finish up! Forty-two seconds of the footage encoded, and only 268 more minutes left to wait! <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />