I'm about to edit a documentary filmed in HDV format (Cannon XL H1) and I'll have about 50 hours footage to digitize and sincronize (the sound is recorded with another device).
I'll use a macbook 2.0 with 2 gb ram and a firewire external lacie hard drive and I'm editing with Final Cut Pro 5.1.4.
I just edited short films in a macbook, for larger projects I usually work with a macpro, so I was wondering if anyone has experience in this kind of architecture, could tell me if this computer is good enough for this project? If not wich should I use, regarding that I must have a laptop.
Re: Editing HDV by Michael Palmer on Dec 16, 2007 at 5:07:37 pm
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.
Re: Editing HDV by Vanessa Pimentel on Dec 17, 2007 at 11:04:06 am
Michael,
I'm finishing this project in a mac pro with the same FCP version (the render and the output), so I don't think that will be a problem. I just didn't understand well, are you suggesting that I use two external hard drives just for the digitizing process or for the whole edition? Because I was thinking in getting a 750gb lacie hard drive, but if I have to have two I must get less gb hard drives.
Re: Editing HDV by Michael Palmer on Dec 17, 2007 at 12:54:44 pm
If this drive is where the media and render files live then this one drive is working all the time, so what I said was, it is a good idea to only store 50% of the drives capacity with the source media. This one drive needs room to work. You will be adding files to it as you edit and it will grow as you go. This is just a precaution or good rule of thumb. 1-750 gig is not realistic for 650 gigs media. If you do get two drives then at some point you can use one to backup the other. And make sure you backup the project file to your mac drive.
I would say this, if you first took the time to delete unwanted media and found yourself with a few hundred gigs available on one drive then go for it.
Drives are cheap and backing up your work is a great idea.
