Is MacBook (regular not pro) decent for video editing?

[choirislife923]

My 1st mac was a PowerPC mac mini that I purchased last year...just to see the world of mac/final cut. all i have to say is...WOW! now that I am a college student, I'm (well, my parents) are going to buy me a laptop for um.."educational use." I currently do most of my editing on my PC using Sony Vegas and VirtualDub, and somewhat-pseudo-often on my mac mini using Final Cut Pro (mac mini's should never be used with pro apps, trust me). Now, my question is, for those who've done video editing on a Macbook, would it be a good choice for Final Cut Pro editing and encoding (in terms of encoding speeds)? Also, how much performance/encoding time boost should I expect if I compared it to my 2.0GHz Athlon XP (my PC editing rig)? I hope to be able to do editing on both OS X and XP on the macbook, flipping to XP to run VirtualDub filters and soforth if an FCP alternative is not found.

[thoughton]

The lack of a graphics card notwithstanding (since you already use a Mini you are probably used to pokey performance! ), I think the Macbook's screen is too small to use with FCP.

[Frobozz]

You may find comments regarding this on either the Macbook or Final Cut Pro forums at discussions.apple.com.

[rumplestiltskin]

The "real-time" effects offered by FCP won't be readily available with the on-board graphics chip. Big deal.

I recently took a Shuttle with an Athlon XP2500+ out of service simply because my iMac (2.0GHz CoreDuo) can do all that my Shuttle could, faster and, for the most part, under Parallels. I do not burn under Parallels (and you can't, yet) as I have all the Mac tools I need.

As for screen real estate: If you arrange your windows appropriately, FCP will be okay. While iMovie is great for smaller projects, it begins to drag with complex projects (although it's much better on my iMac than my older 2.0GHz dual-CPU G5 - really!)