iMac Intel Duo, Macbook Pro or Dual G5 for HDV?
 

Well I'm set to get a new FX-1 from B&H tomorrow and was wondering what's the speediest Mac for HDV editing: iMac Intel Duo, MacBook Pro or DualCore G5?

Assuming I'll have the version of FCP that runs on Intel Mac's which would be faster, better suited for 1080i HDV?

(I've edited FX1 footage on my Mac G5 Dual 2.5 w/4.5 GB ram and it wasn't as fast as I thought it'd be- I've heard the Intel Mac's are quite a bit better with HDV- hence the questions)

Thanks everyone!

Hi Steve,

I just picked up an intel based MacBook Pro, it's about the fastest thing out there right now, and I like the portability.

If you research it on the net, you'll find that people are reporting that it is as fast as their dual G5.

If you can wait the rumors are that there will be intel based towers in August.

Good Luck,

Tom Chaney

PS look here : http://www.apple.com/universal/

Tom, Yes I too have read the MacBook Pro absolutely flies with HDV- but have yet to read any posts about the Intel iMac which shares very similar specs to that of the MBPro and even allows 23" Cinema Displays to extend the desktop (which I have)......I kinda like the idea of a dual monitor setup which is what I'd have with a 20" iMac (I know the MBPro would also do the same)......the big plus for the MacBook Pro is it's portability- which is really nice but not essenial for me personally.

So I'm up all night trying to find users experiences with the Intel iMac and it's handling of HDV.

Thanks Tom for the reply.

Tom, I checked out the link you put where it shows benchmaks for both machines. Initially it seemd as if the MacBook Pro was faster than the Intel iMac but they're comparing it to previous models of which the MBPro was compared to a Powerbook which is G4 powered and the iMac was benched against a 2.0 GHZ G5- so while they don't compare the 2 machines aginst themselves- it appears the iMac is actually the faster of the 2 machines. I wish they had the FCP 1080i render numbers for all the current Mac's- that would be a great indication of it's operation editing HDV.

Just thought I'd mention this small finding.

We have a dual 2ghz G5 and it does not do as well as I expected with HDV from our XL H1. I would personally take any of the current Intel Macs over the G5 unless it's a Quad G5.

Steve, another thing to consider: AFAIK, the MacBook Pro has a CPU that is soldered to the logic board, while the iMac and the mini have socketted CPUs. This means that you can upgrade the CPU of the latter machines very easily, should you want more speed at some point down the line. Just a thought...

HTH,

Ron

Ron, I wasn't aware of that- do you think Apple is going to support socketed upgrades?

The one BAD thing about the iMac is that it has a single firewire bus and this has caused problems for people trying to capture clips onto a "media" fw HD. The MacBook Pro is the same BUT you can use a card that would allow another FW connection that's different from the primary fw bus- meaning you could setup an ext fw HD and capture to it while using the primary fw bus to connect to the HDV camera.

Today is the day I'm set to get the FX1 and an Intel Mac and i'm still not sure which route I'll go- iMac or MBP!
Thanks for the info guys!

Steve,

I went through the same thing before I made my purchase, the imac does appear to be a nice option.

Another thing that swayed my decision to the MacBook Pro was the imac can drive another display but you will need a converter, where as the MacBook is ready to go out of the box.

You may want to consider the 17" MacBook pro as well. I just finished installing FCP on my new MacBook Pro, and I have a Phillips HD LCD attached to it, with a LaCie 500 gig Firewire and I'm pretty happy - okay very happy.

Just one more note to add to the confusion, the gentlemen at the Apple Store did suggest an imac to me as well. But you are right, there is only one firewire bus that the two ports share.

Good luck with the decision.

Tom

Historically, Apple has never supported third-party CPU-upgrades, but this does by no means imply that they won't work. If you google for it, you can find a number of references of people who have successfully upgraded their Intel-Macs with faster CoreDuo-CPUs. These are original Intel-parts that can be bought from a wide variety of retailers.

FWIW,

Ron

I think the 2 choices for serious editing (in the Mac world) are the G5 or waiting for the Intel desktop Macs. The Macbook Pro and the Intel IMac are both too limited in terms of expansion. Neither one can take 3rd party video or sound or import cards, and more important, neither one can take a separate Firewire card. Apple's implementation of Firewire is a bit less than optimal. My own G5 had constant difficulty with external drives until I added a third party three-port card. Since then, no problem. And you'll find you will eventually need serious external storage to edit anything over 30 minutes.

Amen to Francois. I've never heard so much G5 bashing. The intels are fast and they look great but professional?? I don't think so. Without upgrade options you're limited to what you have. Do the intel macs even have a PCI bus? What about the next greatest screaming fast video card. There's nowhere to put that inside either.

I have two machines: a dual 2.0 G5 and a dual 1.8 G4. That's right a dual 1.8 G4 that's almost six years old and it's ripping 10 bit uncompressed in final cut studio because it's a professional computer that allows you to buy RAID cards, capture cards, and stuff lots of extra Hard Drive space inside. And you can always pop out your original 466 G4 processor and drop in dual 1.8. Sheer processing can save you a few minutes in rendering but storage is super important, especially with HD. If you're planning to capture HDV and then convert to AIC, you're going to be eating 100 Gigs like peanuts at a baseball game.

Both the MacBook Pro and iMac have considerably more than sufficient video cards and configuarability. Both have 256mb options and extended desktop. They are both faster than anything but a Quad Core G5. Right now, Apple's flagship video editing workstation is eithe the Quad G5 or the MBP 17".

As for Firewire, on bus is usually sufficient. I have 2 drives, a dvd burner and camera on one FW bus and have no problems. There can be issues with certain drives, G-Tech being one, and other FW devices. Our Dual proc G5 needed anothe card installed so that we could use the G-Tech G-Raids in conjunction with our AJA Io. That being said, the MBP allows for the addition of another FW bus through its ExpressCard/34 slot.

I personally would not buy a Quad G5 right now since the PPC structure is going out the door. Come this Tuesday, with the introduction of the iBook replacement, the MacBook, the G5 tower will be the only thing left to switch to intel.

I agree well said.

I hope you are being very sarcastic! I have a fully loaded intel Imac that gives me over 33 hours of capture time in HDV 720p mode. It is a 500GB internal hard disk. That is just slightly better than 30 minutes.

Scott,

That's lots of space but it's not a very good idea to capture your media to your system drive as far as FCP performance goes.

Steve what did you end up buying? How is it testing? Don't abandon this thread!

Evan, I ended up buying the Intel iMac 20" that was customized by Apple for sale at B&H to high end uers (upgraded ram, video card memory and HD etc.) I also bought a Sony FX-1 and some accessories (mics, batts etc...)

I went the iMac route because of the many people who have replaced the processor with higher/faster cpu's because it's socketed- and there's tons of posts on other computing forums describing how easy it was and the performance gains were considerable. The MacBook Pro is awesome but B&H didn't have the 17" in stock so I took that as another sign to get the 20" iMac.

I can't say much performance-wise as I haven't edited any video yet but it does play my older Sony FX-1 clips I had saved on a 500GB ext. fw hd perfectly and smoothly- even zoomed to 2X res- it doesn't skip a beat! I'm sure this machine will be fine for awhile (until I see the Intel G6 of course!!)

(Note: My Dual 2.5ghz G5 couldn't play 2x FX1 clips smoothly- it would stutter and jerk a bit between frames- so I agree these Intel Macs are more powerful and faster than even the current G5's- except perhaps the Quad Mac...dollar for dollar, the iMac seems the way to go for Mac users wanting to edit HDV footage, especially with it's extended video capabilities with an Apple 23" Cinema Display ~no regrest here!)

Now if I can find a DTE solution for capturing HDV clips onto a portable HD- that would be killer- all the current solutions are buggy with most users being disatisfied....I wish the Firestore units worked- but with m2t clips being captured it's not a good solution for Mac users as FCP can't work with muxed video presently. Let's see how that "Bella" unit works- seems interesting if it actually works!

2.0 intel imac is faster than dual 2.5? IT IS NOT POSSIBLE. You're comparing a scaling test between your dual 2.5 and the imac. This is a measure of the video card performance not computer processing. The new imacs are hard-wired PCI-e ATI 1600 video cards. That video card is a major step up from the stock Radeon 9600 you probably have in your G5. Drop in a Radeon x800 and you'll scale all over the place. And current dual core G5s have much more modern PCI-e nvidia 6600 cards. To test processing speed, do a rendering test or an export test or an mpeg 2 compression test and you'll see the speed difference. Also you can use Xbench. It is a mac benchmarking utility available for free and offers comprehensive benchmarking of macs. The benchmark scores are based on a dual 2.0 G5. So any score that is below 100 is slower than a dual 2.0 G5 and anything higher is faster. I'm sure you'll see higher scores for the video card part of the test and maybe in memory as well, but the processing section will show how much faster your dual 2.5 really is.

There's nothing wrong with getting an imac and it has great performance. (when running applications that are universal. Classic is also not supported. I don't think photoshop is currently available in a universal form. And if you don't have the universal version of Final cut get ready for much slower performance. See this review - http://www.macaddict.com/issues/2006/4/reviews/imacs) I'm glad you're happy with your purchase but I also don't want to give someone who might be reading this thread the wrong impression as they try to decide what's best for them. There are always trade-offs.

The imac core duos do not have a PCI bus, so you can't add RAID cards, capture cards, or any other cards. They do not have a AGP or PCI-e bus but have a hard-wired video card that cannot be replaced. You have learned youself with the scaling test you did how fast video cards become obsolete (your video card in the dual 2.5 was the hot thing just a year and a half ago and now it's getting its butt whipped.) The imac core duos can only hold 2 GB of Ram vs. 8GB in your G5 and 16GB in current dual core G5s. A G5 can hold 1 terabyte of HD space internally and will always be able to be upgraded with whatever new video card or PCI card solution comes along. Maybe you feel you'll never need any of this, but with an imac I can assure you that you won't be able to need it. SATA RAIDs can pump over 500 MB/sec off PCI cards. Decklink HD capture cards can connect you to professional video equipment and capture uncompressed video from the FX1 component HD outputs, and video cards dynamically gain speed each year. All of this will make your imac feel the slow down by this time next year. If you would've spend $300 on a brand new video card any stuttering would be long gone and I'm sure with all the extras you had to add to the imac (more ram, bigger HD) puts the price way too close to a brand new Dual core G5 with all the advantages I've listed above. Besides the fast that the new power mac G5 (or G6, whatever they call it) are due to come out very soon based on Apple's past release periods. You can also by a refurb G5 dual core direcly from apple for $1699 for a dual core 2.0. Available today.

Nathan it sounds like you know your stuff- so I wont go on and contest anything you've said. I was looking for an out of the box Mac that will edit the HDV footage the Sony FX1 outputs- and from all accounts written everywhere on the net- the MBP and iMac's are just about as good as it gets for Mac users. I'm sure all the fancy video card upgrades for the G5 as well as other cards, RAID's etc all add better function for the G5's but for normal HDV footage the current MBP and Intel iMac's are perfectly adequate and don't need much in upgrades other than perhaps some ram- having said that- I'm perfectly content with the iMac but will of course buy whatever tower Mac releases with an Intel processor for the very reasons you state.

I went to the Apple store today to buy an adapter for my Mac Mini for my daughter's room and did see an iMac hooked up to a demo FX-1 with footage running FCP.....I asked if I could "mess" with the project and the salesman said "sure" (it was randon clips someone there had captured and put in a timeline)... I played around with a few cuts and fast scrolls and I was super impressed- had I not known better I would have thought it was regular DV footage and not 1080i....my dual 2.5 ghz Mac doesn't feel that speedy when doing similar things....so I'm sure I made the right choice and can't wait to work on my own projects with that much fluidity.

I told the salesman I had the same iMac and camera and he said tons of customers ask about the camera- but he didn't have them in stock for sale...we spoke a little about FCP and FCP Xpress and I went on my way.

I can't wait to see what sort of performance Apple achieves with their Intel Tower Mac G6 (or whatever name they give it.)

Thanks for your feedback, Steve! Let us know your impressions once you've logged a few editing hours on your iMac!

Curiously,

Ron

Sure it is, depending on what you're testing. Remember, the "megahertz myth" cuts both ways, and the Intel Core Duo processor is a newer design than the G5 CPUs.

Check out this comparison:

http://www.macologist.org/showthread.php?t=2602

The G5s clearly led in some categories, but were behind the new iMacs in others.

"In general, the new Intel-based Macs are very impressive rigs—the overall performance of Intel CD-based iMacs and the MacBook Pro are on par with mid level G5 PowerMacs. "

No problem- I hope others contemplating similar options take into account my observances.


Note: The Apple Store guy told me FCP Xpress can't be run on the Intel Mac's currently- that's ashame for people wanting to run it on the Intel machines.

Hey Steve, I wasn't trying to rain on your parade. Like I said there's nothing wrong with going the imac direction but a new video card would've addressed you're snappiness needs. The intel imac is the newest and it does have the horsepower. I just know that people read these forums looking to make decisions about what equipment to buy, like I have many times. I just don't want to give someone the impression that the best and only way to go is to go out and buy an imac. People need to know the pluses and the minuses of either side. Everyone was happy to note the minuses of the G5 and only the pluses of the intel imacs. There are certainly minuses to consider for both.

To Kevin, thanks for the article link. It will be a huge asset for anyone reading this thread to do some research. A few notes on what I saw. There's only two real world tests and the photoshop test doesn't even show the results from any of the G5's but you can clearly see one of the big minuses to the intels. If you have the universal version of the program running on your machine you're going to run slow. So don't buy the imac if you already own Final Cut studio for a powermac because it's going to crawl on the intel. You must buy the universal version that just came out. Six months from now this probably won't be an issue but right now it is. And photoshop does not have a universal version right now. That's important for people to know.

The itunes test showed an equal result from imac to dual 2.0 G5. The xbench results are especially telling for processor performace especially the CPU tests. The comparable 2.0 G5 does come out on top except for the giant leap of the intels on the GCD loop. Also the Cinebench 9.5 CPU render is also a good indicator of sheer CPU power. Note the imac and a dual 2.0 G5 again score identical. With system memory and graphics processing as expected the intel does kick some butt. This is important but that gap closes a lot when compared with G5s that have a faster video card. And that's my other huge point. The intel's have the newest video card and this time next year it won't be the newest. Another year after that and you'll be where those G5s are now except you won't be upgrading, you'll be buying a new machine. With a G5 you can pop it out and drop in something faster. Being upgradable is a major thing to be able to keep up with changing trends.

My second machine is a G4 that began its life as a 466 G4 with an original radeon, that's right just radeon, this was before they even gave them numbers. It now has a dual 1.8 with a radeon 9800Pro and a highpoint RocketRAID SATA controller. The score for this machine is listed at xbench if you want to see how it did.

Finally, I was wondering if any of the G5's that were used for all of the benchmarking were dual core models? It just says PM G5/2.0 and lists the video card. I'm assuming none were because I don't see any Nvidia video cards listed (minus the Quad). They should run one of the dual core G5s through the tests. The dual cores have faster memory, a 1MB on chip cache, faster video cards, and a faster video card bus-PCI-e, much more similar hardware to an intel imac. If you really want to go even farther, slap in 16GB of ram and run some motion tests. The G5 is still a very useable choice. The pluses and minuses everyone has to weigh out and try to pick what fits their needs.

For me, I'd suffer with what you have for at least a year and wait for the arrival of the intel G5 (or G6). It seems the soon to be released revision to the G5 will not be intel. The intels will come with the next cycle. If you're looking for a deal to buy used make sure to get one of the G5s with the PCI-X or PCI-e busses because a select few of the G5s came with standard PCI which is dying out. Go to www.lowendmac.com to see all of the equipment on any G5 model out there to find the right models for you. When the new G5 comes out any older G5s that are being sold as refurbs by apple will drop in price. It's another way to save some money and they come with a full 1 year warranty and you can buy applecare to extend it.

Don't tell my single drive MBP that its not supposed to run FCP 5.1 faster than my dual 2.5 G5 Raid system. If it hears you say that it might slow down...
:-)

I keep saying, that when the new Quad core intel based Mac tower comes out, we are all going to be in for a treat. But for now, taking FCP HDV editing anywhere without ANY performance hit compared to my G5, is a MAJOR plus!

[QUOTE=Greg Bellotte]Don't tell my single drive MBP that its not supposed to run FCP 5.1 faster than my dual 2.5 G5 Raid system. If it hears you say that it might slow down...
:-)

Wow, now 5400 RPM laptop hard drives are out performing SATA RAID systems!! Once again pluses and minuses. With the MBP portability is it's main strength. Greg your laptop is awesome!! But maybe not exactly as much as you say, if you want to make an honest comparison and are trying to offer your experience as advice that will cause someone to spend $2700 on a piece of equipment.

Once again video card performace will affect your Final Cut performance. A radeon 1600 with 256 MB of ram will out perform a Radeon 9600 with 128 MB of ram all the time by miles. If we're all talking to joe shmoe out there who has some dough and wants to get a new computer, he'd be comparing the dual core G5s that have much faster GPUs so lets be fair and compare apples to apples. If you want portability go MBP. If you want an all in one go Imac. If you want upgradability go G5. If you want the best period hang around and see what apple's going to be releasing.

Let me also get this out, HDV runs at a data rate only slightly higher than DV. Hard Drive speed is not a factor. I can playback AIC HD files at full framerate from an ATA66 bus interface on an old G4. Any decent speed G5, G4 with upgraded processor, or newer imac, etc. will edit HDV without any problems. What exactly is this speed you talk about? And if your video card is old in your G5 it needs some processing love. Send it to retirement. Video cards have processors and memory all measured in MHZ and the faster the ratings the faster you go! Hope that answers the snappiness issue.

Fast to me is how fast my sequence renders, how fast I can export mpeg 2, and even better export H.264 HD. Have you tested any of these things out? These examples will show PROCESSING POWER not your video card power. Please 2+2 still equals 4 and 2.5 + 2.5 still equals 5. This isn't the old G4 argument where one is 64bit and the other is 32 bit so the MHz don't count. Apple had a hard time selling that line and it got Motorola fired from the job. I'm the first to say there's more to computer speeds that Ghz. that's what I'm trying to explain. It's memory, bus, video card, Hard Drives. Compare apples to apples, not citing video card intensive activities that compare the newest video card to an old one especially in a system that's greatest strength is the fact it can be upgraded with the newest video card.

Is there not some other Apple hardware expert out there that can please come to my rescue I'm starting to sound like a broken record.

Well, I consider myself one, but I can't come to your rescue, I'm afraid. Let's face the facts: the intel Macs all have an extremely high-performance system architecture with fast CPUs, large L2-caches, and fast front-side and PCIe busses. Graphics performance in the intel iMacs and MacBook Pros is wildly superior to anything but the most expensive GPU-options Apple has ever offered for the PPC-line.

The thread starter intends to use his system for HDV-editing, let's remember that. If you don't need gobs of RAM, don't work with uncompressed HD, and don't have the need for serious expandability, you can't go wrong with an intel Mac! Apple's never offered this much bang for the buck - period!

I own a Quad and have a Fibre Channel RAID attached, so I know what performance is all about. I decided to go for the Quad late last year because I will skip the first-gen Intel-based towers, thus avoiding the teething pains always associated with brand-new PC-architectures. But now that we know what the intel Macs can deliver, I would no longer go for a Quad if I could wait a few more months. And don't get me started on performance-per-watt. My Quad is a howling furnace!!

HTH,

Ron

But I have to agree with you on this, Nathan: I, too, would not have replaced a dual-2.5 GHz G5 with an intel iMac, but would have gone for a GPU-upgrade instead. This machine is nowhere near obsolete, and will handle HDV well once upgraded...

FWIW,

Ron

In a time when folks are editing feature length movies on there laptops, I'm starting to think that mentality is falling by the wayside.

I just don't believe that is such a big deal anymore assuming you have a big enough internal drive.

Since computers are so fast now, what are the drawbacks? I don't see laptop users w/ externals hard disks either.

Well lets give you a few examples. Obviously, when capturing HDV over firewire the process is realtime no matter what your system. There are no dropped frames on either my G5 or MBP. Previewing the clips, scrubbing, and all the little tweaks of timeline assembly seem perform at the same speed and crispness on both systems. Applying a few RT filters seems the same. etc. etc.

Now when we get to rendering or printing back to HDV tape the true muscle starts to show. Rendering a HDV timeline to SD DVD (mpeg2) seems to be about 20% faster on the MBP. Maybe I should have just said Compressor is faster? Printing to HDV tape (or at least the preparing that happens before the actual tape writting) happens faster on the MBP, but the difference isn't alsways consistent for some reason.

Again, my MBP is 2.0 GHZ, 2GB ram and the 7200 rpm HDD. The G5 is a dual 2.5 GHZ with 2.5 GB ram, a 7200 system drive, and a four SATA raid for the video. At this point I dont think the video card difference makes much difference (128/9600XT vs 256/X1600) but I should have a good project for motion next month to see how that shakes out.

I would think there would be more difference (esp for the G5) if I was capping HD SDI, but that wasn;t the original goal of this thread.

All I was attemping to say, was that for HDV start to finish-the MBP rocks! Being able to shoot and edit on location, and hand the client a finished product on HDV tape, Mac HD DVD, or .TS on red DVD for the JVC player, etc. is really awesome. And MUCH more cost effective than some of the broadcast projects I work on.

Well since it's been a short while now using the Intel iMac and Sony FX1, I have a good sense of the performance I'm experiencing using FCP 5.1.

First I'll address the issue of the iMac having 1 firewire bus (2 ports on same bus) and the precaution of using external fw drives to capture media. I've been capturing raw HDV (no AIC encoding) to an external 300GB hard-drive in a generic Comp-USA fw case while having the FX1 connected to the other firewire port and have experienced ZERO problems. I see the fw hd activity light blink intermittently during capture signaling all is going well and the drive doesn't seem to strain at all during the capture. I'm not experiencing any dropped frames or any sort of data-throughput issues. I haven't worked on any very long projects but what I have worked with, seems problem-free. The "precaution" of the iMac having 2 firewire ports on the same bus and the avoidance of external fw drives as capture devices while capturing has been a non-issue for me personally. Until I notice any irregular perfomance I'll continue to use my external fw drives as my "primary" media source for HDV clips much as how I had the G5 setup.
I'd have to say my dual 2.5ghz G5 with 4.5 gb ram occasionally hiccuped during playback of full 1080i footage as where the Intel iMac has never done this. People have suggested this is a video card issue- perhaps it is and I'll defer that issue to them. I am driving a second 23" HD Cinema Display with the iMac and everything is working very well- no skips, jumps or hiccups of any sort. I would have to say using the iMac with raw HDV footage works just as if I were editing regular DV. I've maxed out the ram on the iMac to 2GB as that's all it supports- other than that, it's out of the box.
This has been my experience with the new Intel iMac and all I can say is that it's been absolutely perfect as an HDV editing machine running FCP 5.1 ($1299 ouch!!!) It handles the HDV footage as easily as normal DV and that's something I truly can't say for the G5. I'm sure you guys will ask about multilayered video and render times etc....I don't have the time put in with my simple projects to answer those questions, but I'll find out soon enough.
For now I have to admit the hype does seem to be real, the Intel iMacs are superb and are probably dollar for dollar the best you'll get in an editing HDV platform ($1899.)
I'm sure the Intel Tower Macs are going to push the performance even further and I'm sure I'll get one- but for now this thing just works great. I can't recommend one high enough- I'm thouroughly pleased and can personally attest to it's use.

I sometimes wish I had gone for the MacBook Pro as portablity would have been "cool" but in all honesty it wasn't important. The prospect of possibly upgrading the processor on the iMac is also a real draw (several websites document this and it's being done rather easily with good perfomance gains- so that's something to look forward to in a year or two.)

(Note: I actually have 3 300 GB drives on that single fw port with 1 setup as the "video" drive, the other is "audio" and the other is "digital photography" and this is the setup I've been using with the iMac without a single problem. I use the other fw port directly to the FX1.)

I hope this thread helps others who are pondering the same choices.
This has been my experience with the iMac, Final Cut Studio 5.1 and the Sony FX1. I've never smiled so much while being broke!

Thanks for the report, Steve! Very good to know. If a USD 1'500 iMac G3 DV SE 400 MHz could handle DV well back in 1999/2000, It's nice to see that an iMac CoreDuo with a similar price tag can handle HDV fluidly six years later. Fun times! :)

Does anyone know what the biggest 7200 rpm 3rd party hard drive solutions are for MacBook Pros? Is it still just 100 GBs?

I wouldn't buy G5 anything anymore unless I was very strapped for cash and needed to buy secondhand or needed any of the advantages of the PowerMacs (more expandability and RAM etc).

Aaron

Yes, AFAIK that's the case. Seagate makes a 160GB 5400rpm drive that could also be up to the task. Unfortunately, it seems that they are currently only offering an U-ATA100 (IDE) version of this drive, no S-ATA.

If an external solution is a possibility for you, and you want the highest performance possible, you could go for the SeriTek S-ATA ExpressCard (not yet shipping, unfortunately) and an external 2.5" or 3.5" S-ATA enclosure.

http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2sm2-e/

However, this solution would require you to power the drive by other means (e.g. via the FireWire-port), because S-ATA does not provide bus power.

FWIW,

Ron

Some numbers to consider
 

In another thread David Tames recnetly posted some xbench numbers to compare the laptop options out there. While David correctly mentions that these results are certainly not scientific they do however give you a ballpark comparison.

And the benchmark G5 is the older dual 2.0 not the newer dual core 2.0. It also has a stock and decaying Radeon 9600 as the video card. Good post David.

I'd like to advise all takers that Xbench benchmarks are a very poor measure of real-world performance. Its measurements are both imprecise and non-representative of real-world use. For detailed performance comparisons involving real-world tests of all sorts of mac-related hardware, visit http://www.barefeats.com/

HTH,

Ron

Expandability?
 

With regards to expandability and RAM...

When would HDV require more than 2GB RAM? In other words, if people are editing HDV fine on an intel iMac with 2GB RAM...then where is the problem?

(I currently edit DV, but at some point, will be switching to HDV. I've considered both the iMac and a G5 for my next upgrade. I thought I had made some headway in deciding which direction to go, but now my head is spinning from this discussion...)

And another question...
 

Does anyone know if there would be any drawback to using an iMac for longer projects (i.e. 60-90 min. fininshed pieces)? External storage devices have sufficed in the past with my G4.

edit and playback times with 2 gig ram are adequate, but render times are sloooow, so if you are doing lots of effects or compositing, it can be quite painful....

regarding longer projects, same applies. i've completed a fifteen minute project with a lot of effects and layers which requires a dual layer DVD drive. i can't burn the project on my (admittedly old) single layer G4 burner, i can only burn it with the dual layer drive in my non-intel imac G5.

length is just one consideration, but even shorter projects can have a file size which exceeds the G4 capacities....

it's a tough time to buy a mac! i bought a new macbook pro because i needed to edit HDV, and my old 1 gb G4 simply couldn't handle it. but if i didn't need it, i would wait. my old G4 does a fine job with DV, and i see no reason to part with it, either. sometimes i'm multi-tasking on several different computers simultaneously. but six months down the road, you'll be seeing faster computers and more of the Universal applications released. that whole "rosetta" transition thing will be over, and the bugs will be cleaned out. if you can wait, then wait.

Yep, sure is. I was producing a project back in January and we were working with three machines, a couple of iMacs (1.8 GHz with 1GB RAM I think) and a Dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5 with 2 GB RAM... the difference in terms of performance (to use a subjective benchmark measure) was between "frustrating" on the iMacs to "accceptable" on the Dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5. And the memory difference was not the big factor: HDV needs processing power to rebuild all those fancy frames that don't really exist. Render/conform times will drag you down editing native HDV unless you avoid any effects and do cuts-only editing and wait until the end to add all the effects.

And here's a solution to faster HDV editing without hardware upgrades... I had to edit another project (also shot in HDV) using my own single processor 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5... my solution? I decided to use Offline RT and edit the old fashioned way: "offline" editing with Offline RT JPEG proxies (created using the Media Manager feature in FCP), this gave me super lighting fast rendering and editing workflow (since the JPEG files are so small and JPEG decompression is so fast) so I could speed through the work, and then when I was all done, do an "Online" (conform the project automatically with HDV media using a new project created from the offline project using the Media Manager feature in FCP).

I decided to do this instead of upgrading to faster iron, as I'm waiting for that Intel speed deamon that will eventually replace the Power Mac G5. Media Manager and offline/online editing workflow might sound like a thing of the past, but it is still relevant today. It's one way to get all the footage from a feature-length project onto a laptop for editing on the road without the hassles of external drives. You can leave those at home and use them when it's time for the final conform, a.k.a. online edit.

The down-side of using Offline RT media proxies is the proxies are not pretty, but I had two weeks to cut a 16 min. doc and I was not going to let anything get in the way of editing quickly, and I like to see all the effects in place for timing/aesthetic reasons, I don't mind the crappy quality proxies, it's easy enough to go back to the original media and look at it when you need to.

So that's another way to tackle at the performance/HDV issue, more hassle, but if you can delay harware purchase for a while (as I wanted to do) it might be worth it, depends on your priorities while editing...