Re: Editing HDV

I believe your macbook is capable of the HDV task if mated with a tested external firewire drive/drives. 50 hours is about 650 gigs of storage needed to just hold your media. What I would suggest is that when you capture make a new clip on all timecode breaks. This will help you delete source clips you don't need later. You will want to use 2 external drives and split this project in half or more. Remember as a precaution the storage drive should only hold 50% of the drive's size with source media to ensure a healthy relationship with Final Cut and all of it's overhead.
Later you can delete unused files and copy over the first half to the second and finish out the project from a single drive. If possible you may seek out a mac pro to finish out the final conform/render. The final cut versions need to match between systems, if they don't and the mac pro is newer then you won't be able to make any more changes from your laptop later. You always take an older version forward, you just can't go the other way. I wouldn't mix systems until the final output point.

Good Luck
Michael Palmer