17" MAC Book Pro, FCP, AJA lo, FirmTek SATA ExpressCard/34 Host,1 terabyte disk array

[dhart]

On another subject other than 1/2 vs. 2/3" CCD cameras, has anyone else purchased this system? If not looks like I'm going to be a guinea pig. From the specs it looks great and I'll have a SD (or HD) uncompressed portable system for around 7-K. (less BetacamSP VTR, which I can borrow for digitizing)

It will nice to do my own cutting again as I get pretty "jiggy" working with an editor.

If anyone else has any experience with this gear, I'd like to hear their impression.

Thanks.

[avidfaa]

I got talked out of buying this configuration and went with a G5 because Firewire and SATA drives aren't fast enough to do HD and there is no way to attach SCSI drives whose speed you'll need. Nice computer, though.

Here's a link on compatible drives:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58636

[2000lux]

I got the 15" G4 because a friend of mine who edits on the road a lot said the 17" doesn't fit well on an airplane tray table.

[Douglas]

I'm running FCP on a 17" (2Gigs Ram) Mac Book Pro and it works well enough. This is my first Mac since about 1998 and in my opinion it's damn slow compared to all of my PCs. If this is a "fast" Mac I feel sorry for anyone with an older one.

Obviously I can't compare how FCP runs on Windows vs. Mac, but when I use Photoshop the Mac is a tedious machine to work on compared to any PC I own. My dream would be a version of FCP that could run on a Windows machine. That would be nice.

Also, I've got the 23" Cinema display and it looks great! But the 17" notebook screen is no where near as good as the 17" screen on a 1 year old Alienware notebook I've got.

Doug

[Nino]

I noticed at the Sony/Apple seminar that the Pro-Book computer that the instructor was using wasn’t very fast and he was only processing small simple clips of XD HD.

When I got back into editing almost two years ago I first bought a 17” G4 and wasn’t very good for my needs. I work mostly with uncompressed BetacamSP thru an AJA Io box. Actually the exterior LaCie drives did not let me capture footage at 10 bit I had to lower it to 8 bit, the difference however was unnoticeable. The real problem was when the projects started becoming more involved with several video levels and digital effects, the G4 got real slow. The new Mac Book Pro supposed to be up to 6 times faster than the G4 so you should be okay if handling only BetacamSP. I ended up buying a G5 dual 2.5 with 4g and it has been working fine, until I started working with HDV. The additional volume of information on HDV really slows down the computer especially when rendering and compressing. Compressing a 12 minutes project into MPEG2 High Quality 2 passes can take up to 5 hours. I usually start the compression at night before going to bed.

I’m waiting for the new Intel based replacement of the G5 that should be out sometime this summer.

[cameragod]

Douglas you really should try Edius on the PC. It kicks the snot out of FCP

[Douglas]

Cameragod,
Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it's more important to be able to interface seamlessly with another company I co-produce several projects per year with- and they are deeply entrenched in several FCP bays.

I'm not really even saying I hate the Mac, but it's just slower than what I'm used to.

At this point, I don't even want to hear about Edius or anything else that will make me want to jump ship. I've got my eyes and ears closed. :-)

Doug

[Canonman]

Cameragod,
Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it's more important to be able to interface seamlessly with another company I co-produce several projects per year with- and they are deeply entrenched in several FCP bays.

That's what made me buy my first Mac a little over a year ago. I must say that I have come to like OSX and because it sits on top of UNIX, it's pretty secure. It's fun to be online and not have to run several applications just for online security like I have running on my Wintel box behind me. ;-)

cm

[Canonman]

I ended up buying a G5 dual 2.5 with 4g and it has been working fine, until I started working with HDV. The additional volume of information on HDV really slows down the computer especially when rendering and compressing. Compressing a 12 minutes project into MPEG2 High Quality 2 passes can take up to 5 hours. I usually start the compression at night before going to bed

Nino,

That concerns me because HDV is essentially the same as mini-DV/DVCAM in terms of data rate. It's 25mbs CBR. FCP 5.0 and up tries to keep everything in HDV even when rendering it should really only be re-conforming the GOP structure for the edits you have made. Another thing I have been told to do for quality DVD encodes is to put compression markers around the transistions in your timeline to force the encoder to use I-Frames on the transitions.

Many people in our FCPUG are saying that 2 pass encoding doesn't yield enough quality difference to justify the extra encoding time. You might want to try a segment on single pass and see for yourself. Standard disclaimer applies...Your Mileage May Vary.

cm

[Alaska cameradude]

A couple things here....

First, yeah photoshop will run slower on that set up. Photoshop has not been rewritten as a "Universal" app yet so the intel Macbook Pro is having to use "Rosetta" to run photoshop. As a matter of fact, the old G4 powerbooks are faster than the Macbook Pro at running Photoshop....see here
www.barefeats.com/pbcd.html
So for using ANY of the Adobe apps like Photoshop or After Effects you are better off staying with a PPC Mac until they have rewritten them with "Universal" coding. Final Cut Pro on the other hand should be faster on the Macbook Pro as the newest version is now a "Universal" app.

Also....the Macbook Pro CAN run anything a PC can run. So if you like Edius or Vegas or anything else....YOU CAN RUN IT ON THE MACBOOK PRO!! It can be a PC or a Mac....that's one of the advantages of it!

[Douglas]

Thanks for the info on the Photoshop situation. That certainly explains what I've been experiencing. I only run the FCP Studio suite of products and Photoshop on the Mac. Nothing else. So Photoshop has been the only cross-platform application I could compare the speeds to. I guess I was too quick to judge the Mac as being slow. I look forward to a Photoshop ugrade ASAP.

Doug

[2000lux]

I just came back from the FCP & XDHD demo' here in Boston. One thing they mentioned that I didn't know is that the current version of the 15" Mac Book Pro only has a fire wire 400 port, it doesn't have an 800 port (yet) so you're probably better off with the 17"er after all.

The demo' was interesting. I learned some things about FCP I didn't know. The newest version is 5.1 so make sure you get that one.