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Will Final Cut run on a Powerbook

marioman38

marioman38

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2006
901
84
Lodi, CA
My friend offered me his 17" 1.33ghz powerbook with a gig of ram for $600...

I think it's a pretty good deal, but how well would it be able to run final cut? I know it won't be lightning, but will it be excruciatingly slooowww? Or would it be bareable/ pretty good???
 
Remember just a few years ago, Apple marketed the G4 PowerBook and PowerMac as "Super Computers" that could handle Final Cut Pro? :p

Today people forget, and think they need a 2 X dual core Mac Pro. :)
 
I have a 1.33 17" PB that runs every app in the final cut studio with no problems.

sure, Motion isnt realtime and is a bit slow... but it runs. And final cut with SD material is no worries.

thats a great laptop.
 
Lebowski said:
I have a 1.33 17" PB that runs every app in the final cut studio with no problems.

sure, Motion isnt realtime and is a bit slow... but it runs. And final cut with SD material is no worries.

thats a great laptop.
Click to expand...

I've never used motion before, because my current mac only has 32vRam, Would real time be somewhat nessasary for an app like motio?
Would Upgrading the ram to 2GB allow Motion to run faster? Or would it be a neglegable difference?
What brand/Retailer is the best for this particular model PB???

Thanks for the help guys!
 
Lebowski said:
I have a 1.33 17" PB that runs every app in the final cut studio with no problems.

sure, Motion isnt realtime and is a bit slow... but it runs. And final cut with SD material is no worries.

thats a great laptop.
Click to expand...



I concur.. It will be fine to get started...

I posted this in another thread as well. I used FCP 3 (i think) on a Titanium 667MGZ, 1 GB RAM, plugged into a cigarette lighter in an 1977 RV and made this movie.... http://www.ourhousethemovie.com

I also used 2 external hard drives. One for rough cut.. and one for final cut...

cheers
 
I wouldn't be doing any HD, so you guys think it should run fine?

Who has the best price for a 1 gig ram chip... I did some quick googles, and most places are about the same... YES, i searched the fourms, and most fourm that had to do with Ram said to search the fourms...
 
marioman38 said:
I've never used motion before, because my current mac only has 32vRam, Would real time be somewhat nessasary for an app like motio?
Would Upgrading the ram to 2GB allow Motion to run faster? Or would it be a neglegable difference?
What brand/Retailer is the best for this particular model PB???

Thanks for the help guys!
Click to expand...


well, if you can, get as much ram as you can for it, but that wont really help motion much as its more dependent on the video card. real time isnt really "necessary" per say... but to me, im used to working mainly on my QuadG5 that flies with final cut studio, so no real time on the powerbook annoys me, but i can definately get work done.

my take is this, the powerbook will do fine for your average video work. to learn on and get the basics of working with final cut it will more than suffice. as you progress and your projects get more complex, you may outgrow it, but you can cross that bridge when you come to it.

i would definately recommend a large 7200 rpm FW drive (250 or more gigs) to use as your scratch disc. the PB has an 80 gig drive and you run out of room real quick. i also like to work with a shuttle controller for frame by frame viewing as well as marking in and out. i have the shuttle pro by contour.
 
I have the PB 17" 1.33 and FCP runs just fine with 2 GB RAM. Sure it's a bit slow but it does work. As others have said make sure you use fast external drives.
 
Definitely grab a fast external drive. 7200 firewire 400 or 800 should do fine - at least 8mb cache. My PB 1.67ghz with 1.5gb of RAM runs all of Final Cut Studio just fine (as said before, motion won't run real time, but it runs).
 
We ran FCP on a g3 500mhz iMac

Chacala_Nayarit said:
Remember just a few years ago, Apple marketed the G4 PowerBook and PowerMac as "Super Computers" that could handle Final Cut Pro? :p

Today people forget, and think they need a 2 X dual core Mac Pro. :)
Click to expand...


on the g3 500 it was slow. but it worked. stable.

I think people also often forget that some of the previous computers were capable of running certain types and builds of software well before the new processors. remember how "fast" g2's were at the time? besides, at worst, you could run FCP 3.x (we have tried it).... on one of those. how bad is that?
I'm sure there are a ton of people still doing that or something similar... I mean, after all, there are still os9 users.
why not look for a earlier version cheap just to try it out? someone somewhere has to be selling an older copy.
 
I produced a small number of HD stop motion videos using FCE on my PowerBook (12", 1.5ghz, 512mb). It runs very well, dare I say comparable to my iMac (C2D 2ghz, 1gb ram) but with slower rendering times. I mean, for a 3 minute stop motion video on my PowerBook took 3 days to render it fully compared to about 4-6 hours for my iMac. Oh and of course H.264 encoding? Slow on PowerBook. But oh well. FCE runs jolly nice.

You'll be reet!
 
I concur .. I did a rather large project a year or two ago on my 800Mhz PBG4, and FCP ran great. I believe I was running version 4.5. Just turn down your realtime render settings and throw some memory in there - you'll be fine. Working with clips and sequences is plenty fast.

Rendering will certainly take some time, though. My best advice is to leave it on whenever you're not using it, with FCP running, so that it'll do background rendering on the clips you haven't gotten around to yet. Then, when you come back, everything will be crystal clear!
 
I run fcp on my 1.5 core solo mac mini all the time...it runs fine...renders slow...but runs fine...youll be fine
 
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