I have a Powerbook G4 running Final Cut Pro HD and have no trouble capturing DV footage and editing smoothley with my old 1ccd Sony Mini DV. Is footage uploaded through my firewire from a new Sony HDR-HC1 going to put any more strain on my system than uploads from my old camera? How much more taxing will uploading with the Final Cut DVCPRO HD 1080i60 capture preset be on my hard disk space and my processor?

Thanks in advance...
-Blake Kimmel

Hi Blake and welcome to DVinfo!

You should be able to capture and edit HDV on FCP5 using your powerbook, but it will be very slow by all reports. There's some info about FCP on various macs in this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=51730

Also see:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=51435

Regarding disk space, that should be similar to regular DV but you shouldn't be capturing and editing video on your internal drive regardless. You will get much better results using an external firewire drive. The internal drive is fragmented with thousands of system and other files, applications and the OS are constantly reading and writing to it, it isn't very large and is also relatively slow.

I'm moving this thread to our HDV forum where others may be able to share their experiences. Other than this... why not just give it a try and let us know how it works for you?