Can you edit a feature documentary in premiere on a 13 inch macbook pro?

G

grantly

Member
Hello,

I do feature length and short documentaries using Premiere on my PC (i7 3770k, 16gb ram and GTX670) and I'm considering getting a baseline macbook pro 13 inch. Is it possible to edit larger projects on it? It's a dual core i5, 8gb ram with decent integrated graphics. It'd all be 1080p footage, not 4k. If anyone uses with Premiere CC on a mac like this one I'd love to hear about your experience with it!
 
Absolutely you can do that. I've edited commercials and short docs shot on RED on my old MacBook Pro. You'll probably want to set your playback resolution to 1/2 or 1/4, and I'd put some money into a fast Thunderbolt storage solution, if possible. But yes, you should totally be able to do what you want.
 
Thanks so much for the response Stephen! I'll pick one up soon then. Is thunderbolt essential for video editing on an external? I've used Firewire 800 before and I've heard of people who use USB 3 but I'm happy to pick up a thunderbolt drive if the difference is that substantial.
 
grantly said:
Thanks so much for the response Stephen! I'll pick one up soon then. Is thunderbolt essential for video editing on an external? I've used Firewire 800 before and I've heard of people who use USB 3 but I'm happy to pick up a thunderbolt drive if the difference is that substantial.
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I'd hesitate to say that anything is "essential" these days. You could edit on a MacBook Air, if you wanted to. But for security of data and speed of data transfer, I'd recommend a Thunderbolt RAID hard drive setup, something like the Promise Pegasus or similar system from LaCie, OWC or CalDigit. (What you get is obviously going to depend on budget.) What you really want is only partially about speed, and more about keeping your data safe. Always keep a backup copy of whatever you're working on stored off-site, and if you can, edit on a RAID 1 or RAID 5 system. All the speed in the world won't do you any good if your data is lost.
 
About a year ago we attempted to start post on a feature in Premiere Pro (on an i7 iMac) and once all the dailies were loaded in we ran into some issues. For example, upon opening the project it would take about 20 minutes to get past the "Media Pending" stage and allow you to start working. a quick google showed us we weren't alone in this. This shook our confidence in the platform and we right back to Avid where we remain very happy. :)

Again, this was roughly a year ago. I don't know if this issue (which seemed to be particular to having a large feature-length project) has been resolved. Maybe it has.

In terms of hardware, I have a 13" MacBook Air that I cut in Avid MC8 without issue. A MacBook Pro should be no problem.
 
I have a hard time editing in Premiere on my MacBook. I'm not a big fan of Premiere to begin with, and the window layout is so cluttered... I prefer FCPx which I highly recommend. It's fast and clean. I stick to my iMac when I edit on Premiere.
 
The only real issue is the quantity of data. We have two macbook pros here and as soon as the drives start to fill up, speed slips. The media pending startup is a pain - but even if you use an external for the source material, your preview files on the faster internal drive work fine, as long as you have space.

I have to admit that longer projects with lots of long clips do mean a few extra cups of coffee while you wait. My projects are usually two hours long (theatre productions) so I'm used to the waits starting from cold. This is the only reason I edit on a powerful PC first. I do have to do some editing on site on the macbook, and it is a bit of a pain, but much better than trying it on a laptop PC - which suffers the same problem, but worse!

I do like Premiere though - I won't be changing.
 
IMO Premier is totally wrong NLE for editing anything longform . The hangs mentioned above, plus alot worse becomse more & more evident as the project fills up with content. I would be looking at another NLE if this project has a large data footprint.

P.S. Premier is fine for shorter projects kills Avid in many respects unfortunately it just not worth the gamble on longform.
 
Surf it Mike said:
IMO Premier is totally wrong NLE for editing anything longform . The hangs mentioned above, plus alot worse becomse more & more evident as the project fills up with content. I would be looking at another NLE if this project has a large data footprint.

P.S. Premier is fine for shorter projects kills Avid in many respects unfortunately it just not worth the gamble on longform.
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Would you recommend Avid or Final Cut? Been using Premiere for the past four years without any issues and it's a huge step up from Vegas which I used before. Would be happy to try one of the others.
 
I thought this was interesting..

I'm not a big fan of Premiere to begin with, and the window layout is so cluttered
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I did not realise until recently that MAC users appear to get a different experience in this regard to Windows PC users.

Was I correct in my observation that the MAC seems to float its Premiere Pro "windows" loosely around the screen with the Desktop displaying in the BG.

The MAC I was using had been set up with dual monitors and I found these floating windows across both... to be messy and clumsy. Constantly requiring "re focussing".

@ the OP

Why get an i5 processor in a laptop when your experience has been with i7?
 
Performance wise I think you'll get by ok for 1080p editing - though it obviously won't be on par with a full-powered workstation. Screen space on a 13 inch laptop might be a big issue for you though.

Personally I struggle to edit anything substantial on a 17-inch laptop screen - anything smaller than that might render me institutionalised after a few weeks.
 
Shooter said:
@ the OP

Why get an i5 processor in a laptop when your experience has been with i7?
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I use an i7 in my desktop, but budget is a factor and the only macbook I can afford is the baseline macbook pro with the dual core i5. I'd just use my desktop to do all my work but I live in a tiny apartment in New York that I'm in 20 hours a day, so I need to get a laptop to work out of the house and keep my sanity :)
 
Of course you can edit on a MacBook, but do you really want to? I used to edit on a G3 mac running FCP 1.0, but I sure wouldn't want to do that now. I think you'd be much happier editing on something with a bigger screen, more space, faster, etc.
 
Surf it Mike said:
IMO Premier is totally wrong NLE for editing anything longform . The hangs mentioned above, plus alot worse becomse more & more evident as the project fills up with content. I would be looking at another NLE if this project has a large data footprint.

P.S. Premier is fine for shorter projects kills Avid in many respects unfortunately it just not worth the gamble on longform.
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Oy. I hate it when people make me defend Abobe. I hate Adobe forcing everyone to rent their software, and I refuse to rent from them (or any other company).

That said, I use the CS6 suite for long form editing without trouble. Using two AVCHD cameras in 1080p30, so doing multicam edits. Use PPro, AE, PHotoshop, Audition, and Encore mainly, on an i7 laptop (before I smartened up). It runs fine, I don't have any problem loading accept for the initial ingesting of footage where it "normalizes everything" which takes a while with that much footage. Initial boot up was slow on the laptop, but this was from a 2009 laptop, before SSDs were the thing they are now.

The end result of one of my projects was four separate hour long class room sessions on DVDs, complete with titles, lower thirds, photoshop stills, and the cutting back and forth with the two cameras. And of course all the menus to navigate the DVDs. I had to do a fair amount of color correction and exposure correction (they wouldn't let me close the window blinds, and levels and colors wandered as a result). So, not much footage without some correction or other against it. And PPro would play it just fine. Had some trouble scrubbing the footage some times, but even scrubbing usually worked fine. Client never commented on performance either.

As to running any NLE on a 13" laptop: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." You'll know what that means after you've tried editing on a laptop for a while. I'm just sayin' that I'm never going to do that again. No way in hell.

If you don't want to rent, you might want to look at Divinci Resolve v12, which is turning out to be quite a competitive NLE, and a no-brainer if you're doing a lot of color correction and grading. Adobe can't touch that. Still.
 
I havent noticed that Shooter - seems to be a similar layout on Mac as other NLE's - Im also using a 58" screen for preview however. That said, a few months back I wanted to edit AVC Intra 4K files and FCPX hadn't as yet been updated with that codec. Premiere CC did, so I opened it up and started. Gave up ten minutes later as the files were doing something to get in (can't remember exactly what the process was called). Decided to just go with the proxies into FCPX. Now, fcpx does have the required codecs, comes straight in. My edit drive is an external Caldigit Raid 5.

I do notice, regardless of NLE the project size determines the load times, however I recently had the need to import over three and a half hours of footage - 1080, and that proved little issue for FCPX. This is all Mac Pro and that may be the difference - installed a GTX980 just prior to all the above as well.
 
Noel Evans said:
That said, a few months back I wanted to edit AVC Intra 4K files and FCPX hadn't as yet been updated with that codec. Premiere CC did, so I opened it up and started. Gave up ten minutes later as the files were doing something to get in (can't remember exactly what the process was called).
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I know the load times can be annoying, but I see them as an integral part of my workflow called "time for lunch".
 
Honestly I don't think you will have any trouble. I do my main editing on a decked out iMac but I have a macbook air that I use for field use and travel. I've had plenty of success editing on it. Personally I hate premiere on all Mac machines so I think you'll run into hang-ups regardless. Personally I think premiere just works smoother on a PC. However, if that is all your budget can afford I say go for it. I'd take a Macbook over a sub 1K pc (or windows 8 for that matter) any day.

Also your drive speed does matter and I don't think the macbook pros (non retina) have USB3 while the airs & retinas do. So that is something to look at and consider when purchasing. It may not be a bad idea to get a drive that is both USB 3 & Thunderbolt so you can use USB3 on your PC and Thunderbolt when connected to your MBP if you go that route.

Also does 13" suck? At times sure, but as long as it's not your main machine I'm sure you'll be fine.
 
The "media pending" issue has been resolved in the latest Yosemite version. Also, can you really edit off of USB 3? I haven't tried but USB used to be a no-no because of non-constant data stream.
 
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