Macbook Pro Specs for FCPX and AVCHD

[Dave Mercer]

Those of you who are editing on Macbook Pros successfully (ie. no choppy video, whirring colored balls, or overheating computers with RAM maxed out) what are your computer specs?

I'm especially interested in hearing from those who're editing AVCHD natively.

I've got a 2008 MBP dual core 2.5 GHz, 4GB RAM and it ain't enough for AVCHD transcoded to Prores, let alone native. I've set up Events on external esata drive, and project file on laptop HD.

Thanks a million!

[Dave Mercer]

Someone out there must be editing successfully with a Macbook Pro no?

[Scott Cassie]

Hey Dave,

Recently bought a MacBook Pro, pretty much maxed out the 15" model.

- 2.2GHz quad core i7
- 8GB Ram
- 128GB SSD
- Hi-res Antiglare screen
- 1GB graphics card (as far as I remember)

Very smooth with AVCHD natively.

Scott

[Dave Mercer]

Thanks Scott.

If you're still out there, have you had any problems with FCPX slowing down when editing longer pieces (say 20 minutes of video plus)?

Best
Dave

[Scott Cassie]

I haven't really edited a lot on FCPX yet as I'm finishing this year on FCP7 first.

Edited a wedding ceremony, speeches and highlight without any performance hits so it's looking promising.

Rendering does seem to take a while, have read somewhere that it's actually quicker to export the completed project than to render it, so I'm looking to just bypass rendering altogether - something I used to do on an older iMac & FCP5.

Hope this helps.

[Michael Liebergot]

Originally Posted by Dave Mercer

Thanks Scott.

If you're still out there, have you had any problems with FCPX slowing down when editing longer pieces (say 20 minutes of video plus)?

Best
Dave

Dave, at the moment FCPX will have issues editing longer edits. This will be a slight issue on any machine. The reason for this is that FCPX doesn't do a good job of dumping memory as it's being used while editing, aka memory leaking. As a result FCPX just keeps on taking and taking available memory until there isn't any more,and as such problems may occur, like lockups or program slow down etc.

To avoid possible issue, it might be best to close out the FCPX from time to time, then re launch FCPX again and edit as needed. There are also a few programs out there that can dump memory for you, but I don;t remember them at the moment.