How recent of a MBP do you need for FCP and HD?

J

jonE5

Veteran
I cant believe im actually asking this, but in sitting at a production last night for my latest project, one of the possible directors (who is doing post work for a few actual features he just shot), told me I need to get final draft, and asked if i had mac or PC. (I am functioning as writer currently, and eventually director of photography most likely)

I was like, man i support hundreds of PC's i just dont really need or want a mac. Well he opened up his 17" macbook pro to show us the trailer for one of the features he just directed (very impressive to btw), and he then clicked over and launched windows 7 ultimate. It looked really nice, and i have known you can do this for a while but how difficult is it?

The reality is that now that im shooting 1080p my little 13" XPS M1330 really isnt going to cut it, and if i want to get mroe serious, especially on working on projects like this where im not the only driving force, im likely going to have to work with the industry standard, Final Cut. I just realized that they will be doing all the editing etc.. .on this in final cut, which means i wont be able to work with any of it on my own time, and even if i could rendering would probably take like 6 hours or so for every 9 or 10 minutes.

Since i have to buy a new laptop for editing anyway i guess i might look at some used MBP's

Im thinking either 15" or 17"

can one thats a year or two old still hang for editing full HD footage? When in Windows mode do you have full access over the USB ports etc..? (for instance if i was using my midi controller keyboard thing, which is windows based would it theoretically work?)

Would one thats say
15.4" screen
2.4 GHz "Penryn" Dual Core Processor
200GB 7200rpm hard drive (faster and better performance than the standard 5400rpm)
4GB RAM
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT Graphics
OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

Work well for dual boot, with windows 7 and for editing in final cut?

My budget is probably going to be about $800-1300 or so for a used one.
 
As long as it has an Intel processor and is a MacBook Pro you should have no trouble running FCP. It's more a question of how long you want to wait for renders. The older the computer generally the slower the renders- also RAM. But um- I'm assuming you meant your budget plus the price of FCP right?

Noah
 
hmm, ughh, should i spend $800 -900 on that setup, or $12-1300 on a unibody dual graphics card one?

arghhh!

Then should i get 15" or 17"?

What is everyone using?
 
jonE5 said:
hmm, ughh, should i spend $800 -900 on that setup, or $12-1300 on a unibody dual graphics card one?

arghhh!

Then should i get 15" or 17"?

What is everyone using?
Click to expand...

I'd go for the unibody personally because at least you'll get warranty coverage for a while. I have a three year old macbook pro that slowly developed a graphics card issue because of overheating and then became virtually unusable for anything but light use. 400 bucks to fix. Decided to get a macmini instead to tide me over as it has virtually the same (but slightly better) specs, and is new. The only advantage of the older macbook pro is that it has a dedicated firewire 400 port, but I've had no issue capturing DV and HDV over firewire 800 while plugged into another drive's FW400 port. And the older 15" has an expresscard 34 slot.
 
I'm using a new 15" MBP, 2.53Ghz, 4gb ram, single video card model NVIDIA 9400m, editing AVCHD video in FCP 6, $1600 brand new. I'm not sure it'd be "needed" to get the dual video card model. I'd think the one you were looking at would be just fine. If you can buy new, go for it but i've owned a lot of used Macs and not only have they worked great, they hold their value really well.
 
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