Can the old Macbook handle multiclip editing?

[HunterGather]

I know that you can run Final Cut Pro relatively well on a macbook (that is, the white or black macbooks, not the new ones).

But how does it handle light multiclip/multicam editing?
Say 3, 4, or 5 clips at once.

Assuming your on a maxed out macbook (2.4ghz, 4gb ram).

Thanks.

 

[bigbossbmb]

the difficulty of multicam editing is having hard drives fast enough for 3, 4, 5+ streams of video. processor-wise the MB is fine. the bottleneck is only being able to use a FW400 hard drive.

that said, you should be able to pull a few streams of DV, but not a higher-bitrate codec like DVCProHD or ProRes.

 

[HunterGather]

Yeah, for now it would strictly be DV.

So is it better to do it with the footage on the macbook drive itself, or through my external hardrive through firewire?

 

[bigbossbmb]

Never keep media that you are editing on the internal drive of any computer. Ever.

Always keept it on a hard drive that is not your system drive.

 

[HunterGather]

Is this more of a speed thing or a safety precaution?

The current project I'm working on, I have the original source files on my external hard drive.
The DV files they were converted to are on my macs hard drive.

Is this ideal?

 

[maxlew]

i just finished up a project using 4 cameras in multiclip on a white macbook 2.16ghz 2gb of ram. it works pretty well as long as your running all the project data from an external hard drive. A firewire one, usb is horrible for things like this.

only thing i can think of is a bigger screen its kinda hard to closely watch all the videos on the smaller screen. also it can get hot at times. otherwise it should be fine most of its cpu based so the macbook is pretty good in that area.

 

[AviationFan]

Is this more of a speed thing or a safety precaution?

A bit of both. On laptops especially, the internal drives are mostly of the slower kind, because that way they can be smaller and lighter. So if you are looking for large capacity, fast transfer rates and cheap purchase price (which pretty much sums up my requirements for media storage drives for me), external drives look much better than an internal laptop drive. Another performance aspect, and this is also true for desktops with larger internal hard drives (not just laptops), is that running a mix of few and large (relatively) media files and tons of smaller "normal" files on the same drive can be difficult (read: slow) to manage (fragmentation), so you don't want both types on the same drive (at least not on the same partition).

The scenario where safety is involved is when during capture or rendering you fill up the hard drive completely. No big deal on an external drive that has no other purpose than to store your media, but if by accident you fill up your system drive entirely, you might have trouble doing anything useful with your computer.

- Martin