Thoughts on old Mac Book Pro for t2i footage

R

RackAndRoll

New member
Hi all,

First post here so I have to mention I love the site. Great information to be gobbled up by my brainsicles.

I'm wondering if there is any hope for my old Mac Book Pro (2.16 GHz Intel 2, 2 GB RAM) to be used as an edit bay for the t2i. Not enough room on the hard drive for footage but that can be solved w/ an external. Also only running fcp express. I'm not as concerned about the fcpe because I'd really like to just chop up some test reels for the time being - no need for anything beyond a little cc.

Thoughts or experiences?

:badputer:
 
I did the entire rough cut of a 2 hour long feature length film with a 5 or 6 year old 1.67 gHz G4 laptop. And that was 1080P DVCPRO HD footage using Final Cut Pro.

So yeah, I'd guess what you have is more than adequate.

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I have a laptop with similar specs to yours and I also have a Mac Pro desktop. Its nice to be able to work on the go, but I am spoiled being able to work on the tower.

Screen size, and processor speed (I am working with 7D footage) have been the two limiting factors for me. Does Express support the new H.264 codec?

Overall, I think you will be fine - Just some small issues to have to get over.
 
Mega, funny you say that. I have a Pro Tower at my office (production company) and I've been completely spoiled by it as well.

I plan to investigate the h.264 codec question soon. I'll post what I find. Thanks for the information.
 
FYI, nobody should be doing anything with that codec. It's preferable (very) to transcode the original footage to another codec for post production work.

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I have that exact l laptop (with 3gb ram) and it does just fine with my 7D projects. Like Chris said, you should never be editing with h.264 footage though, transcode to something like ProRes or Apple Intermediate Codec with Mpeg Streamclip or Compressor and your laptop will do well.
 
Blah blah blah... Never edit with it because you're using software that won't allow you to edit it.

I can edit it like butter on a $650 laptop. No excuses, it's 2010.
 
i can edit fine on my 2 year old dell xps m1330 laptop, its the rendering that takes a long time. With some minor grading, a few transitions etc... a 10 min clip can take 6-7 hours (*at 1080p)
 
That's to be expected on an older laptop. On a newer i5 I don't need to render filters/transitions and can play 2 layers of 7D/T2i h.264/AVCHD in RT at full frame full rez.

People said the exact same thing when HDV came out... "Oh, HDV is Mpeg 2 which is impossible to edit... " Then computers and software caught up and now it's no big deal. Same thing happening with h.264/AVCHD. This time all the players are coming to the table making it happen except for Apple who still force it's users to transcode. Back when we edited HDV it wasn't a big deal because you needed to "capture" the tapes anyway so the encoding could be done while capturing.
 
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