MacBook Air + Final Cut = will it work? With what specs?

[Bill Killer]

We are looking to upgrade a family member's late 2010 MBP to a MacBook Air. Will the high end late 2013 model work with Final Cut well? What specs would you recommend?

Thanks for any help in advance.

 

[Bill Killer]

And when I mean specs, is it necessary to bump the processor up to i7 and ram to 8GB?

 

[Boyd01]

I am running my old version of FCP (6.06) on my MBA and have been very pleased with its performance. I previously ran it on a 2008 15" MBP (c2d 2.4ghz with 4gb RAM) and upgraded to a 2011 13" i5/4gb/256gb MBA. This was a big improvement for me - that machine had a cpu almost 2x faster than my old machine, but the SSD made the overall experience much, much faster.

This summer I upgraded to a 2013 11" i7/8gb/512gb MBA and it runs even better. Rendering is noticeably faster. Aside from that though, it feels pretty much the same.

If you can afford it, get the maximum spec like I did. If not, I think you will still be fine with the i5 and a smaller SSD. I would get 8gb RAM either way, although. The 512gb SSD is blazing fast though - I get about 700mb/s read and write performance. The 128gb SSD is much, much slower. Not sure about the 256.

Caveat: like I said, this is an old version of FCP, not sure how newer versions would work. But I suspect you will be fine. The MBA is a really powerful little machine.

 

[talmy]

We are looking to upgrade a family member's late 2010 MBP to a MacBook Air. Will the high end late 2013 model work with Final Cut well? What specs would you recommend?

Thanks for any help in advance.

With FCPX the processor is everything and there isn't really a great one in the Air line. If I had to use an Air I'd go top end processor first. If I didn't have to get an Air I'd go with a 15" MBP, Mac mini, or iMac to get a quad-core processor. The quad core process will gain more performance than 8GB RAM or an SSD.