Planning on buying a 13" Macbook Pro for Final Cut. Will this be enough?

dtjohns1

Well-known member
I plan on buying the macbook pro 13" 2.4 ghz 4gb of ram and im wondering if this will be sufficient for editing pro res canon t2i footage without any major problems? I also forgot to mention that I will be upgrading the ram to 8gb and i plan on getting the newest final cut studio.
 
The short answer: yes. (The less-short answer: don't forget to use the forum "search" function.)

I've been using my MBP 13" to edit ProRes footage (from the T2i, 7D and 5DII), and it's worked perfectly. Yes, transcoding can be a bit slow, but depending on how much footage you have, you could…

A. Walk the dogs.
B. Get a coffee.
C. See a movie.
D. Sleep.

As far as editing goes, the only real "issue" I've run into is render time using third-party filters like Magic Bullet. These tend to bog down the system and slow things to a crawl. But the 3-Way Color Corrector works fine, as do pretty much all of the native FCP filters.
 
While a laptop is very useful I would suggest getting an Imac which would be a faster computer for around the same price.
 
^^^ I need a comp that can be mobile because when I do long shoots I need to be able to dump the files from my t2i onto it. And for the poster above so I dont need to have a 15" or better or I7? The reason im asking is today i went into the apple store at my university and the guy in there was acting like if I tried using fcp on the 13" the comp wouldnt be able to handle it. I figured it was a marketing ploy.
 
You don't "need" the latest Core i5 or i7 processor for transcoding and editing Canon HDSLR footage on the Mac. Are they faster? Absolutely, and if your budget allows it, I'd always suggest getting the fastest machine you can that fits your needs. But I've been using my 2.53Ghz 13" MBP for about nine months now without a single problem.

It's not going to win any CPU speed drag races, but it works, and the price was right.
 
Thanks for the advice. Now im can sleep easy know that i dont have to spend $2,000+ and can use the money i save to buy a $400 academic version of final cut studio
 
I myself am looking at getting a new Mac b/c mine is winding down I fear (errors etc).

I like the speed of the new iMac but I'm a little confused if it'll actually speed things up in the areas I want it to - converting, renders, exporting and the like, the time and computer grind intensive tasks.

As whilst the i7's are quad core and can be hyper-threaded etc, if FCP isn't 64 bit, which it is, then won't it fail to take advantage of this anyway? Ergo is there actually a tangible advantage for FCP w/the quad core i7's?
 
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