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Need help chosing a good machine for FCP

T

toothpaste

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 8, 2005
293
5
My younger sister is goign to school for film. She is heavily into film editing and needs a computer for home. While she uses Powermac at school, her budget is limited and therefore me telling her to get a Powermac is not a feasible solution. Can anyone suggest a machine that will work decently with Final Cut Pro 5.1. Do Powerbooks handle Final Cut Pro? Real world use would be more useful to me as opposed to just some stats of a website.

Thanks for your help.:)
 
My only real world (extensive) experience with FCP is on a Power Mac. That said, now that FCP is a universal binary, the iMac Core Duo and MacBook Pro should both be very well suited to running FCP. The only reason I'd give the iMac a slight edge is because of the bigger screen and bigger hard drive. If portability is important though, the MacBook Pro should handle things just great.
 
I used to cut with Final Cut Pro 1.0 on a 400 Mhz iMac...so anything you buy today will be fine. Powerbook G4's cut with FCP very well. MacBook Pros cut faster of course, but for general use plus editing plus anything else...Powerbooks are more than adequate. You CAN get away with an iBook, but I would wait until they are upgraded to Intel first.
 
My sister found a powerbook 500mhz g4, would that be sufficient to run FCP somewhat smoothly? Or is it just better to save up a bit and get a newer machine?

Thanks for the replies. :)
 
No, a 500 MHz G4 is too slow to run FCP comfortably. Personally, I'd hesitate to run it on anything slower than 1.25 GHz or so. FCP 1.0 may have run fine on a 400 MHz iMac, but we're up to FCP 5 now, and as with any software, the capabilities as well as required resources for FCP have increased as computers have gotten more powerful. Photoshop used to run fine on 68K Mac IIs, but of course nobody would dream of running the latest version on anything even close to that slow.
 
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