How well does Final Cut Pro work/render on the TiBooks and new APBs? Anyone?

[GeneR]

I have long been interested in purchasing an Apple Powerbook to do my FCP editing on it. But when I went to the Apple site I noticed that the disk speed was in the neighborhood of 4200 rpms. Is this fast enough to use FCP: digitizing, editing, rendering, and exporting the files? I fear that such a slow RPM on the hard drive would create a sort of "bottleneck" when using FCP.

I don't know. It sounds awfully slow to me even though most PBs seem to have pretty fast processor speeds. If anyone has an answer to these questions, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

 

[shadowfax0]

you can use an outboard Firewire HD for a scratch disk, but if you want to keep it all on the PB, then you can 'cutomize' your order on the apple.com/store site and get a 60 GB with 5400 RPM drive, which brings you up the desktop level (about a year and a half ago level, but hey, not so bad I think )

 

[benixau]

remember this - rpm matters for very little, example:

4200rpm - 8ms seek time - 30MB/s max
7200rpm - 9.2ms seek time - 28MB/s max

would you get the 7200rpm drive?? no. acctually in this situation the 4200 drive is even better. tis lower speed means that there is less heat given off. loks at the sustained transfer rate and the seek time of the drive and then you will be able to decide with important figures.

rpm matters more for heat in such small drives.

 

[WinterMute]

FPC runs well enough, but on my 400 Ti the rendering process was slow (depends on how many FX are being applied), and the real-time FX won't run in FCP3. I've used an 877 and it runs much quicker, so I don't think disc access is too much of a problem, especially as you can run a 7200 firewire external as Shadowfax0 notes.

I'm very interested in the 1Ghz 17" APB, it looks to solve several issues with FCP and DVD St Pro, but it must be said that the PowerBook will probably never equal the raw power of a desktop machine, but then you can't edit video on a train from North Wales on a G4 tower...

Certainly the new machines have the power to run these apps comfortably, and you'll only notice the speed lag if ou regularly transfer between the two designs.

 

[LethalWolfe]

it's a big no-no to store your media on the same physical drive that you have your OS, apps, and data on. Having everything on one drive is a sure fire way to drop frames and have crappy FCP performance.

If yer only going to mess around w/FCP every now and then on small proejcts you'll probably be fine. But if you actually want to use it for editing then you'll need FW HDDs.


Lethal

 

[ELYXR]

This might be a dumb question, but the TiBook's only have 1 firewire port... so how could you capture to a firewire drive? Do you need a firewire hub? If so, where do you get them?

 

[DavisBAnimal]

Originally posted by ELYXR
This might be a dumb question, but the TiBook's only have 1 firewire port... so how could you capture to a firewire drive? Do you need a firewire hub? If so, where do you get them?

Most Firewire drives come with an extra Firewire port on the back so you can plug your camcorder into there, and have a little chain of camera-drive-laptop that captures video just fine (in my experience).

 

[shadowfax0]

You can daisy chain ~20-30 (somewhere in there) Firewire Devices together, so you shouldn't have a problem