I'm working with footage shot in 1080i60
Ok- 1st: That's a hefty peice of HD to play with. Very potent and likely to tax your 15'' powerbook, or any mac for that matter... But I'll try helping...
overlaying them on top of the other causes the whole thing to re-render and I have to wait an additional 10-15 min for that. I've never worked with HD footage before so I wonder, is this normal?
No- your sequence settings do not exactly match your clip settings.
Right click (or control click) a clip in your browswer and a menu will pop up. Go to Item Properties > Format. Write down the clip's codec and all other details.
Now, click anywhere in the timeline and go up top to toolbar > Sequence > Sequence Settings (I'm going off memory here so it may not be exact). Try setting the sequence settings to match the hd clip as best you can (1080i / 59.98? / 60i? / CCIR 601 instead of square pixel? - experiment until you can drop a clip in the timeline without requiring a render. The Item Properties of the clip should give you all the details you need.
If it is normal, how do you guys, who work with HD footage for a living, cope with the long render times? Did I miss something? A settings issue perhaps? I don't want to set it on Unlimited RT because it gets choppy. On Easy Setup I've set the project to "HDV - 1080i60." I figured that follows because that's what the footage is.
I still think a setting may be off that causes a Render bar to appear. Regardless, most people I know are using some sort of RAID array to push HD video. Your 5400 internal drive will choke and your fw 800 drives won't do dramatically better. I personally have a 1 terabite SATA RAID I purchases from Macgurus.com. It is four 7200rpm drives raided as one harddrive, with a sata card going into my express34 slot, giving me throughput beyond the capability of my internal sata (my internal 7200). The Raid and card cost me around $900, and I see the very setup for various low budget shows coming soon to the history channel and animal planet (except they have 8 drive enclosures and mac pros, which outperform 4 bay enclosures on a macbook pro.)
Anywho, if you find the right setting and it works, sweet. No RAID needed. If you don't find the right setting or you do and it's still too slow, here's the last option: easily Recompressing your clips to be easier handled. Select all clips in the browser and
Go to File>Media Manager, and choose : Recompress in the options. Then it gives you a choice of different codecs to recompress to. There's a way to custom build your own, but just try something that looks as though it will take up less space (there's a space comparison bar that will make it easy for you). Just don't do PAL or some different frame rate or a different aspect ratio and you'll be fine.
Good luck! Most of this is off memory so- let me know if you have issues.
Ben