Another Macbook Pro ?

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DVX100Shooter

Veteran
As I am getting close to making a purchase I had a question. The one I want has a 120gb hard drive. Now I know from experience with my G5 to put my projects on a drive other than the system drive. I have 2 hard drives in my G5 and 1 external. Now with the laptop, what is the best way to do this? If I want to be able to capture footage and edit say on the plane or away from home for that matter. It would seem like I would have to capture to the system drive and save my projects to that drive if I am not able to bring along an external unless there is a battery operated external hard drive out there on the market. I have been doing a lot of traveling lately and it would be nice to be able to edit and work on projects on the plane.
 
There are portable drives that power off the firewire. I know you can get 80-100 GB at least, probably more. typically, however, these are not 7200 rpm. I have used them while traveling, though.
 
i dont think the drive inside the macbook pro spins at 7200 rpm. Thanks for the suggestion though. I will look into those portable drives.
 
I edit on the road with a macbook pro with a lacie firewire portable drive AND a western digital portable usb2 drive at the same time, and they're both 5400rpm and plenty fast enough. The only issue, obviously, is that unplugged, using portable drives, you drain the battery even faster, and running fcp studio with 2 drives, you're lucky to get 30 mins.
 
You can configure a MacBook Pro with a 100GB 7200RPM internal drive which would likely be a reasonable set up for on-the-plane work.

With the 17" there is built-in FW800 as well. And then you can use a regular AC-powered FW800 ext drive if you don't absolutely need to be on battery power.
 
Another approach for editing on a laptop, rather than worrying about drive space and all that, is to use the Media Manager feature in Final Cut Pro and create OfflineRT clips. This allows you to edit from small JPEG proxies, and when you're done editing, you can reconnect your project to the original media (on an external hard drive) and you're set to do the final "online" edit. This old fashioned "offline/online" approach is still viable and relevant today. I've cut several projects this way. It's also a good way to cut HDV projects on older, slower laptops. FCP really makes it easy to create an OfflineRT version of your project from the original media, edit that, and then reconnect to the original media. This alows you to have the whole project on a single internal hard drive on a laptop and leave the external drives at home while you are on the road.
 
hhmm really nice Nicolas... Damn temporarely not available in the Netherlands. I would go for the 200 GB with 7200 rpm.. Thanks for the advice...

Niels
 
No more editing on planes

No more editing on planes

Since the latest terrorist threat = no more laptops so no more editing on planes. I use G-tech firewire 800 drives with my macbook pro 17". They have performed flawlessly and it is a lot easier to edit in the hotel room than on a plane anyway.
 
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