Mac question

[Keith Alan Morris]

i'm buying my wife a Macbook Pro any second here and the specs I want to pay for are:
15.4" Wide 2 GB 2.2 GHz
Core 2 Duo 120 GB 5400 SuperDrive
8x DVD+R/CD-RW NVIDIA GeForce 8400M
GT 128 MB SDRAM 5.6 lbs

it should make a good set backup computer. what should i bump it up to later to make it able to easily work with Red footage? anything i should know now before i purchase?

thanks fellas!

[John Wee]

7200 rpm HD and if you really want to do post with the laptop maybe you want to go 256mb on the gpu.
If you are a student or can get a student to buy it for you, you get $200 off and a free ipod.

[Craig Schober]

i'm buying my wife a Macbook Pro any second here and the specs I want to pay for are:
15.4" Wide 2 GB 2.2 GHz
Core 2 Duo 120 GB 5400 SuperDrive
8x DVD+R/CD-RW NVIDIA GeForce 8400M
GT 128 MB SDRAM 5.6 lbs

it should make a good set backup computer. what should i bump it up to later to make it able to easily work with Red footage? anything i should know now before i purchase?

thanks fellas!

not sure how you can really "bump up" this computer much more. you can max out the ram to 3gb and add external firewire or esata drives to store all that redcode but not much more. maybe change out the burner for a blu-ray when they are cheaper and faster. otherwise i would suggest a 17" 1920x1080 native display if you want to view red footage on this machine. if you wait until friday, red might release minimum specs for macs along with that redcine beta.

[Keith Alan Morris]

7200 rpm HD and if you really want to do post with the laptop maybe you want to go 256mb on the gpu.
If you are a student or can get a student to buy it for you, you get $200 off and a free ipod.

is this what you're referring to? Core 2 Duo 120 GB 5400 SuperDrive

the 5400 just aint enough, is it? i've been using 7200 since i dont know when. wtf?

[John Wee]

160 gb serial ATA Hard drive 7200 rpm

If you use a desktop, chances are you have a 7200 rpm Hard drive.

[Hrvoje Simic]

I also wouldn't recommend going with 128 MB GPU version. Definitely not enough for serious work.

[Keith Alan Morris]

if you wait until friday, red might release minimum specs for macs along with that redcine beta.

i dont know if the lady can wait til friday...

[Michael Schrengohst]

?
I know the PowerBooks cannot use REDCINE, but
I saw somewhere that you could wrap
a REDCINE file with QuickTime?
Could a PowerBook just read those files?

[S. Um]

Tell her she might get something even better.

Don't worry too much about the 5400rpm internal drive. You'll probably put your data on an external drive anyway.

[Keith Alan Morris]

not sure how you can really "bump up" this computer much more. you can max out the ram to 3gb and add external firewire or esata drives to store all that redcode but not much more. maybe change out the burner for a blu-ray when they are cheaper and faster. otherwise i would suggest a 17" 1920x1080 native display if you want to view red footage on this machine. if you wait until friday, red might release minimum specs for macs along with that redcine beta.

how about those minimum specs? shes chompin' at the bit...

[Keith Alan Morris]

we went with this:
15.4" Wide 2 GB 2.2 GHz
Core 2 Duo 120 GB 5400 SuperDrive
8x DVD+R/CD-RW NVIDIA GeForce 8400M
GT 128 MB SDRAM 5.6 lbs -----> BUT WE BUMPED UP TO 256MB

thanks guys! i hope it plays back these 2k clips better than what my machines do now....

[Jeremy Teman]

You can get 4gb in the new MB Pros, so you can upgrade whenever

[Mark Thorpe]

Can't understand why the drive would be at 5400rpm for editing though? Shouldn't it be minimum 7200rpm?

Anyway I heard from my 'contact' at Apple and apparently there are no further upgrades in the pipeline within the foreseeable future for the Mac Book Pro's. I'll be getting a 15.4" as thats also better for use, IMHO, in the 'cheap seats' of international air travel.

Cheers,
Mark.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

It doesn't matter because you want to have your footage on an external drive.
Its my understanding that using you want a dedicated HDD for handling your video files.
I've got a FW800 disk for my editing.

[Mark Thorpe]

So will you auto assign your capture scratch directly to that external HDD? I've normally gone direct to the main HDD and then archived out to externals. Mind you that's with using desktop systems.

[Ken K]

Not a bad config! I'd still upgrade that hard drive later to a 7200rpm one or have someone do it for you. You have to pop open the cover on the lappy to do it, but it's not a terribly hard procedure if you're comfy with DIY upgrades.

I picked up the same model (w/2.4GHz proc) when they did the lineup refresh recently and did my own 7200rpm upgrade. I stuck with the standard 2GB, but you definitely need more for editing Red footage. That upgrade is MUCH simpler though. For editing, I picked up a NitroAV eSATA ExpressCard and went with a custom external eSATA case and the new Western Digital 750GB drive. I evaluated a bunch of eSATA solutions and they all had issues. Most of them use passive cooling or have crappy designs. For not much more than a retail 750GB eSATA drive, I was able to get that WD drive and the Venus DS3 external case here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332012

If you go that route though, be careful on which case you get. They have one with a standard SATA port in the back and one with an eSATA port. eSATA ports are much more robust.

And CamDiver, with the laptop, I set my capture scratch in FCP to the eSATA drive. The only thing you have to watch out for is if you have OS X spin down drives when they're not in use for awhile. Nothing like going to lunch and coming back to FCP with error messages saying your scratch drives are missing. :blush:

[Mark Thorpe]

And CamDiver, with the laptop, I set my capture scratch in FCP to the eSATA drive. The only thing you have to watch out for is if you have OS X spin down drives when they're not in use for awhile. Nothing like going to lunch and coming back to FCP with error messages saying your scratch drives are missing. :blush: Thats what I was thinking of because I had seen that happen to someone running an inferior laptop system, they were having big issues with long captures to the native 5400rpm drive. Its more the playback issue I'm thinking of now seeing as we're entering into solid state file transfer and getting away from the real time capture process.

Cheers,
Mark.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

So will you auto assign your capture scratch directly to that external HDD? I've normally gone direct to the main HDD and then archived out to externals. Mind you that's with using desktop systems.

Yes, I rarely capture to my internal HDD as I rarely have more than a couple GBs free space.

[Mark Thorpe]

Ahhh, OK. I have a G5 dedicated solely to the project at hand. Granted I have a small client base at the moment given my location and services offered etc so I can generally tend to have max 2 projects on the go at any one time. The daily stuff involves max about 12GB of HDV stuff and then a larger compilation type project or short film in the works stuck in a partition of the main HDD. All stock on externals. Finish the projects, clean out the internal drives and then every 2 weeks run systems check and repairs, renew licenses etc.

Cheers,
Mark.