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new MBA or MBP for light video editing

A

alexandermont

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 6, 2013
13
4
I have a 2011 MBA, fully upgraded. Works great. But recently, I started recording screencasts. Fan goes crazy, things slow down. I want to upgrade.

I was thinking of getting the 2013 MBA, fully upgraded. Will this be enough for my needs? I'd rather have an air than a pro, I love how portable and fast it is.

I'd be recording screencasts with Screenflow, and editing them. Or making screen recordings with Quicktime. I'd like my machine not to be super taxed while doing that.
 
rMBP 13" an option

I've had every iteration of the Air since the 2nd gen core 2 duo. I decided to upgrade to the 13" rMBP instead of the Ivy Bridge/Haswell Air. I got the base model(2.6GHz i5, 8GB, 125GB) from Apple for $1249 refurbished. I picked up the rMBP because of the awesome redesigned cooling system Apple put in it. It can move a lot more hot air away from the processors enabling the processors to work at higher speeds for longer periods of time. This means when I'm doing heavy tasks like video encoding it doesn't have to clock the processor down at all(the air clocks down the processor all the time during heavy tasks because it can't handle the heat).

Anyways for roughly the same price as what you would spend for the new Air you can get a refurbished rMBP 13" from Apple that will handle video editing/coding way better than any MBA as well as the best screen in the market. You get a faster processor and an HDMI out port. It does way about 0.5lbs more than the Air but it has a smaller footprint and you probably won't notice the difference after using it for a week. That's what I would do if I were you. Good luck!
 
I have a maxed out 2012 Air and it cannot handle screen recording software. I have tried many different applications, but all of them lag to the point where they end up crashing and nothing else on my computer will respond while they're open.

But hey, Haswell processors may be a big improvement over the Ivy Bridge in my 2012 Air. I just thought that with a 2.0GHz i7 and 8 GB RAM mine would be able to handle it.

Not sure if this gives you any insight. But if I had to make a guess, I'd say you'd be really disappointed with the performance of an Air with screen recording software, and I'd definitely go with a Pro.
 
vojta3476 said:
I have a maxed out 2012 Air and it cannot handle screen recording software. I have tried many different applications, but all of them lag to the point where they end up crashing and nothing else on my computer will respond while they're open.

But hey, Haswell processors may be a big improvement over the Ivy Bridge in my 2012 Air. I just thought that with a 2.0GHz i7 and 8 GB RAM mine would be able to handle it.

Not sure if this gives you any insight. But if I had to make a guess, I'd say you'd be really disappointed with the performance of an Air with screen recording software, and I'd definitely go with a Pro.
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Agreed, The has well cpus are not that different from ivy bridge except in power management(battery life)/GPU. The biggest problem in the Air is being able to cool the CPU during heavy tasks(like screen recording) and space wise there's no way to make that happen in the Air...
 
I don't know anything about "screencasts", but I was able to edit professional HD video (XDCAM EX HQ) with no problems on my 2011 13" i5 84gb/256gb MBA. Fans kicked in during rendering, but no big deal.

Just upgraded to a 2013 11" i7 8gb/512gb MBA and it also works great with my old version of Final Cut Pro (6.x). Rendering is definitely a bit faster. If I was doing huge projects, I would get something more powerful - I may have something coming up next year to justify that. But for the time being, I love the MBA since it's so portable. In fact, I dropped down to an 11" MBA with the new machine since it's even easier to travel with.
 
Boyd01 said:
I don't know anything about "screencasts", but I was able to edit professional HD video (XDCAM EX HQ) with no problems on my 2011 13" i5 84gb/256gb MBA. Fans kicked in during rendering, but no big deal.

Just upgraded to a 2013 11" i7 8gb/512gb MBA and it also works great with my old version of Final Cut Pro (6.x). Rendering is definitely a bit faster. If I was doing huge projects, I would get something more powerful - I may have something coming up next year to justify that. But for the time being, I love the MBA since it's so portable. In fact, I dropped down to an 11" MBA with the new machine since it's even easier to travel with.
Click to expand...

Does the kick in on the 2013 model as well? I like having a quiet computer.
 
If you're talking about the 13" Air, it lags when re-drawing the screen on a webpage, if you're not running at retina resolution (eg running at x by 1050).

Don't know if that makes a difference, but it's not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to pushing pixels, and in that regard the air might be better as it has fewer pixels.
 
alexandermont said:
Does the kick in on the 2013 model as well? I like having a quiet computer.
Click to expand...

I guess it depends on what you are rendering. On the 2011 13" MBA, it would kick in pretty quickly. I think ambient room temperature also has a big effect on this though.

The 2013 11" MBA is brand new and I have not tried any serious video work on it yet. But just now I kicked off a render of a full HD XDCAM EX clip to a small h.264 movie. It has been running for about 5 minutes in the background and says 10 minutes remain. In addition to safari, I'm also downloading a Logic Pro update from the App Store as I write this. The fans just now kicked in quietly but are getting louder now.

I don't have a problem with that myself. If I want to do cpu intensive stuff like rendering, I can live with a bit of fan noise. :)

I have now quit from FCP and the fans are quickly winding down and getting quieter. They should stop completely in a few seconds I think. No airconditioning in this room, it's sort of a humid rainy day here and the wall thermomter reads 78F.

I can barely hear the fan running now.
 
What is unclear about the post that quoted the article? He specifically mentions the 13" rMBP. According to Apple's site, the max configuration would be the dual core 2.9ghz i7.

Sorry, maybe I am missing something though.

alexandermont said:
What about this article from Macworld? Says the fully upgraded MBA (which I now have) does better than the 13" rMBP on most benchmarks.
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