New 13" MacBook

for_mlove

for_mlove

Well-known member
Just saw that Apple rolled out the 13" MacBook. Looks very appealing for those wanting to be as mobile as possible. 1" thin 1280x800 native resolution, a DualCore processor, up to 2 gig of RAM, there's a lot to like. However, no PCMCIA or Expresscard slot at all? Pretty much means you need to use your camera or a P2 store to get the footage off the P2 card... I was looking at something like this as an attractive alterative to a P2 store for about the same money, but I'm not sure now. What are some thoughts??
 
Just shot a feature and the P2 store was a god send. Simple and fast and reliable. You can train anyone to use it in no time. It tries to be idiot proof. It won't let you record over or capture cards twice. It's a great feature to have. during the chaos of a shoot when you are not 100% positive you dumped a card you can quickly double check it in the P2 store before clearing the card in camera.

I even accidently recorded onto the end of a card that had been dumped already. I was afraid the P2 store wouldn't let me dump it again but it allowed it. The lap top is great but if you have to pick one over the other I would go with the P2 store.

We never used our laptop on set after day one. I dumped the P2 store every night to multiple harddrives. Sure I risked failure of the P2 drive before making the dump and I wouldn't recomend doing things that way but we were pretty short handed. Either way it worked above and beyond.
 
I just ordered one. I'll have it and my crossgrade upgrade to Final Cut Studio by the 26th. I don't see any reason why Final Cut wouldn't work on this. Considering I've been using it since Final Cut Pro (The original!) on a 450mhz mac it seems ridiculous that it wouldn't work here.
 
Some thoughts

The only visable down side is it only has one firewire 400 port. Bus sharing.
So you'll' have to capture direct to hard disk then off load, via USB 2.0 or firewire 400.
Not a great problem, on reflection.
Then you couldn't or should l say, may have problems running HD footage on a 5400rpm Hard drive.
But all things being equal it looks like a great machine.

After thought, one could capture to the internal hard drive in the field and when you get back to HQ.
Off load onto the external hard drive. Cutting out the P2 card.

Hmm... gravy...

Kind regards
THE HONEST LIAR
 
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Gorilla King said:
I just ordered one. I'll have it and my crossgrade upgrade to Final Cut Studio by the 26th. I don't see any reason why Final Cut wouldn't work on this. Considering I've been using it since Final Cut Pro (The original!) on a 450mhz mac it seems ridiculous that it wouldn't work here.
Click to expand...

You had a way to capture footage to a dedicated internal drive on that.

At least if you can find a way to ingest a p2 card, you don't have to worry about actually capturing.
 
Gorilla King,

Definitely post your impressions here, I'd be anxious to see how happy you are with FCP on one of these.

Do FW 400 and USB share the same bus on these systems? Wondering if you could plug the camera into the FW port and an external HD into the USB port and maintain a quick transfer speed. Or capture on the fly that way.
 
for_mlove said:
Do FW 400 and USB share the same bus on these systems? Wondering if you could plug the camera into the FW port and an external HD into the USB port and maintain a quick transfer speed. Or capture on the fly that way.
Click to expand...


Those are independent and unrelated buses.

As to capturing to a USB hard drive, it is not recommended. From what I've experienced and read here and elsewhere the capture become unreliable after a few minutes.
 
Motion will not work on these new machines because of the integrated graphics. It's basically the same arrangement as the Mac Mini.
 
And with a 5400 rpm internal drive, I'm guessing that using one of these to capture isn't such a good idea?? There's only one FW port and no way to add another right?
 
Capturing is one thing but how about editing and playing back?
I would think the 7200rpm would be the way to go.

Kind regards
THE HONEST LIAR
 
Studio installs fine on the Core Duo Mac Mini... Motion even runs pretty well. The previews are not as smooth as on my MacBook Pro or my Dual G5, but Motion DOES run on the mini, and it doesn't suck... Can't do a lot of realtime effects in FinalCut on the Mini, but the basics work really well - including DVCPROHD. So this MacBook will be a pretty nice laptop for editing, etc...
 
Well that's good to hear. I didn't get around to visiting the site after people said they'd try working with FCP on the Mini, so it's good to hear.
 
I have some interesting news for you guys. In light of the fact that I have another ten days to wait until my Macbook arrives I've been reading everything I could find on it. There's a guy over on the Macrumors.com forums and he said the harddrive is right under the battery and easily replaceable. He's already swapped his out for a 7200rpm 100gig one. Just thought y'all would like to know!
 
I don't know... everybody has their own workflow predilections, but the P2 store seems kinda silly to me. It's a huge amount of money for -- essentially -- just a hard drive. I have a g4 laptop and in addition to dumping stuff to the internal drive, I attach a 200 dollar (as opposed to 1600 dollar P2 store) bus powered firewire hard drive (80 GB). this works swimmingly in the field, gives me more GBs than a P2 store, and saves over 1,400 dollars. Plus, you can edit on your laptop in FCP... sort of speaks for itself in my view...

if you don't have a PCMCIA slot on your computer, then that's a whole other workflow animal...

Justin.
 
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