new to mac

I've finally decided to take the plunge and get my first Mac. I've been working as a freelance editor/camerman for the last year on a pentium machine, having spent three years at art school. though i started on premiere i had the pleasure of using final cut for the last year as a student. I'm planning to move from Premiere Pro on PC to FCP on a 15 or 17 inch macbookpro. I have a few questions if someone has the time to help me out please.
I hear the latter has a different firewire port(800 instead of 400). Does this make any significant difference?
Are there any other important differences between these machines i need to know about?
I'm considering getting the smaller 15 version and buying a good 20inch wide screen monitor by NEC. Am i right in thinking i can run this machine off the larger monitor with the lid down if i like.
Is it worth my while to get the 7200 hardisk upgrade?
I'm planning to get 2gig of RAM and a large external disk by maxtor or lacie.
Does this sound like a good system?
Is version 6 worth hanging on a bit longer for and when will it be likely to arrive?
Phew!!! Glad i got that off my chest
Thanks folks
Dom.

If you are set to only use a MacBook for FCP, then the 400 vs 800 Firewire becomes important. Since you need an external drive to capture to and edit from, the 800 FW would be more advantageous, in general. The 17" is easier on the eyes because FCP needs SPACE on the desktop. If you are definitely always using an external monitor, then it's not that big a deal for the 15", but get a widescreen external.

Stay away from LaCie and Maxtor (my prefs) The 7200 rpm internal drive will help run the applications better, but do not consider editing footage from the internal drive. FCP 6 is a LONG way off - most likely. If you have ANY current version of SoundTrack, Motion or FCP , there is a wonderful Crossgrade deal to get you a complete FCStudio package really cheap!

I don't think you can run a Mac laptop with the lid down - it puts the OS to sleep. But I would highly recommend an external keyboard and mouse anyway, so you can park the computer out of your way if you like.

However, many Macs (don't know about Macbook Pro) allow you to split screen real estate among different monitors, so you might be able to have some FCP windows on the Mac and others on the monitor. Best of all worlds.

And as far as big screens go, be sure to consider the Dell 24". Good price, and it gets many raves on this forum for image quality and versatility. And don't forget a PAL monitor!

Scott

Also, nothing to do with Final Cut, but OS X is based on a UNIX operating system, very very different from both Windows and OS 9. They did an extraordinary job at hiding all the UNIX-isms from you, but it's still down there running things in the engine room.

That's why all the engineers and Systems People who wouldn't look at an older Mac at gunpoint went out and bought the newer Macs.

Odd things happen, like that disk drive icon up there in the upper right? That's not the actual drive like it is in Windows. That's an iconic representation of the Mounted File System that *think's* it's a hard drive. In Final Cut, this can cause things like "Memory Error" which really means a hard drive problem and a full or corrupted hard drive that can bring the system to its knees.

The up side is that OS X is very hard to kill. There's no Common Registry like in Windows and you can screw things up until next Thursday and not have the actual machine go down--just your application.

I have migrated almost my whole life to a PowerBook because I found almost all the jobs I need done can be done with the newer Mac tools. I keep all the PCs around because, yes, I can keep three or four machines running at once.

By the way, a number of these advantages go down the toilet when you run Windows and OS X at the same time, which is why the Apple tools all make you reboot between Operating Systems. I can't help thinking that if you run both at once, you end up with the worst features of both.

But maybe that's just me.

Koz

Don't forget this deal if you don't own FCP yet.

Save up to $300 when you buy Final Cut Studio with a Power Mac, MacBook Pro, or iMac between April 4, 2006, and June 26, 2006.

[www.apple.com]

Thanks for that John. Any reason why you don't like Maxtor and Lacie externals? and what would you use instead?

I know LaCie Firewire drives are EVERYWHERE!, and perhaps that is why they fail so often. If you ask here which FW drive is best, you will get nearly every opinion that there is. The point to my statment is finding a relly good, reliable disk and bridge board inside the enclosure.

There are new controller cards coming out that my be even better for your MacBook than the Firewire ports. I am sold on Serial ATA (SATA) drives for stability and even on a MacBook there are soon coming (what used to be called CardBus) external slot SATA controller cards that can host a two drive external SATA RAID.

About Maxtor , even though Seagate owns them now, their failure history is too spotty for me to personally trust. I have used IBM, WesternDigital and Seagate for years with only a couple of minor problems. The Seagates with 5 year warranties and a best buy for the monies. The Maxtor drives are usually the cheapest, which may say something?

<<<I know LaCie Firewire drives are EVERYWHERE!, >>>

It is said that just by playing the percentages, LaCie drives are going to appear to fail more often since every third hard drive is a LaCie. If half-of-one percent of them fail, that's thousands of drives.

However, we have multiple LaCies and the failure rate just in our little world has not been good.

I'm standing back about Western Digital and IBM. Both have had bad runs of certain model numbers. I've had to apply for warrantee repairs on several IBMs and have several Western Digitals work forever.

Koz

I noticed the new 17" laptop has the ability to be reawakened after the screen is closed by an external keyboard or mouse initiation.
Dan

I just told someone else today that their Lacie had gone down, taking all on board with it. He's lost a couple of hundred gig of media and several weeks worth of work. Possibly it can be retrieved, but probably at a cost that will make his eyes water.

AFAIC, any savings made on buying a LaCie are made null and void by the stress, pain and cost of having it fail. There's something wrong with them, and it begins with F.

On my current job I've been using two Lacie 500GBs, one of which was bought only a little over a week ago, and they're *already* starting to act up. Both of them. One stopped mounting unless I unplugged the power cable, and the other (the new one) makes clucking noises, crashed my Finder today, and gives me the Spinning Beachball of Death, even though I formatted it before I used it, dismount and shut it down properly after every session, and it has only about 200GB of data on it right now. While the three Promax 250GBs I'd been juggling on three different projects never caused a second of suspicion as to their performance.

Experience rarely lies.