FCE 4 MBA 13" Maxed Out vs. Late 2008 MBP 15"

[JNL Productions]

Despite not finding much information as to how well Final Cut Express 4 would run on a new Macbook Air, I decided to go ahead and buy a maxed out 13" model to find the answer. I rendered a 2:24 long trailer for Inception at 720p HD quality on both the MBA and a late 2008/early 2009 MBP 15". The MBP has a 2.66ghz Intel Core 2 Duo w/6mb shared L2 Cache and 4gb ram, along with GeForce 9400M integrated graphics with 256mb vram and GeForce 9600M GT w/512mb vram. The MBA took 11:52 to render the clip and the MBP took 9:50 to render it. I'm thoroughly pleased with these results and they were pretty much what I was expecting for buying the maxed out 13" MBA. I'm sure the newer 15 and 17" MBP's would render much quicker (probably half the time as the Air or lower), however I wanted the Air for the portability factor. I'll do some more tests with motion and other effects and see how long they take to render and the overall performance of the application.