Sort of OT - FCP and MacBook

[twotoneska]

Has anyone tried to run Final Cut Pro on a regular MacBook? If so, is it worth it if you don't have access to a MacBook Pro?

[El Jeffe]

It will work. Make sure you have am external HD connected via fw400 for the capture scratch and your video files and you should be fine.

[adamgarner]

There is a workflow you should read up on. I cannot recall the name of it, but basically if you look through the FCP manual it's in there. Read up on it.

The basic idea is that you capture your footage at a lower res, edit, then reconnect media at a larger res. That will save all the processing for your little macbook.

If you're editing DV footage, no problem at all. This workflow is designed for HD footage I'd imagine.

[greg_8mm]

It's called offline editing. It's supersimple with FCP actually..

I use a 12" 1.5Ghz powerbook (that's from the pre-macbook era) with FCP 5.0.

The last telecine I did I asked to transfer to 8-bit uncompressed files on harddisk. Of course, my powerbook wasn't able to play back the files properly..

So what I did was render out the uncompressed files to standard DV files. What you then do is edit normally in FCP with the DV files you have. Then you 'relink' the files in your browser window to the uncompressed files, and as you render out the final version of your project FCP uses the uncompressed files instead of the DV files.

It's easy as that!

[twotoneska]

Thanks guys, for all of the advice. I'm running FCP on an iMac right now, and want something portable that I can also run it on (should I need to), but didn't really want to have to invest in a MacBook Pro.

Anyways, thanks again!

[greg_8mm]

If you're just planning to do some basic editing, not any compositing or heavy animations you'll be more than fine with a Mac Book. Especially with the higher end model.. You'll be fine..