Mac Pro vs Macbook Pro

PerceptionFilms

PerceptionFilms

Active member
I'm thinking about selling my Mac Pro and getting a Macbook Pro. I can only afford to have one or the other. I will be editing footage shot on the HVX200. Is this a crazy idea? I mostly want to be able to capture 1080 24P direct to the Macbook Pro from the camera and still be able to edit a feature film with it.
 
Mac Pro, screens as large as you can afford makes for a very pleasant and productive editing experience, upgradable, better graphics card, holds more RAM, internal media drives, longer live span, etc.

MacBook Pro, small screen size makes for more difficult editing experience, not upgradable, limited RAM, media drives must be portable FW, shorter life span, etc.

It's a no-brainer for me.
 
It looks like the only thing you want to do that the Mac Pro can't do is capture direct to disk on location. I recently captured about 5 1/2 hours of footage, including a couple of 2 hour clips, to a 1.5 Ghz G4 PowerBook and that worked quite well. Would your budget allow you to purchase a used G4 PB in addition to your Mac Pro? It would cost a lot less than a new MacBook Pro--also probably less than a Firestore.
 
shoot I have a MBP rev A version, I just got an esata card with a 1TB esata HD (all from Promax)... I would tade my setup for a macpro for sure, although I would lose out on capturing through FCP for the interviews I do... I'll be testing it out tonight to see if the setup will work or not, because all I have is 2 4gig cards and no p2 store or firestore...

jeff
 
Thanks everyone for the good advice. Just what I needed to hear. I guess what I was thinking is that I could use the MBP in the field to capture and view the footage and then take it home and hook it up to a 24" Monitor and external keyboard and edit with it. But maybe I should just buy a used Powerbook for capturing and viewing.
 
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I use a 17" Powerbook, runs DVCPRO-HD really well. I'd never editi native HDV on it, but everything else runs just fine. Max it out on RAM, though, and get a good size external FW800 drive.
 
The disk recording to a 1.5Ghz 15" PowerBook I mentioned above was also HD--720p24 with FCP stripping out the redundant frames from the 60p stream on the fly. It worked quite well.

Kevin
 
I know that editing on a Mac Pro will be a lot faster, but I just want to know if editing HD on a Macbook Pro is reasonable or not even worth bothering with. I don't spend a ton of time editing so I don't care if I have the BEST system and I would prefer the portability, but if editing HD on a macbook pro isn't even very practical then I'll have to go with a Mac Pro
 
It's totally practical. I'm on the 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.33 GHz processor and 2 gigs ram, and a 500 gig G-DRIVE on the FW800 port. Works just fine for DVCPRO-HD. I haven't used a Mac Pro so I can't compare though I'd imagine it'd be twice as fast.
 
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