Building a FCP setup using a laptop as a CPU.

Does anyone know the disadvantages of running FCP off of a jacked up laptop to a monitor vs. using a tower?

Expandability is why I love towers. Portability is why I love MBPs.

With a MacPro, you can have the option of plugging in capture cards (with MBPs you are limited to IO devices that run off either the external PCIe or FW800).

Also, install cards to support external storage arrays in a MacPro.. (Fibre Channel cards, eSATA, SCSI, etc).

Then graphics cards. You can swap out the default graphics card for a badass graphics card (512MB of VRAM) to render FXplugs, render in AE/Motion/Shake.

You can also upgrade the RAM to 32 gigs (FCP only reads 2.5 of 4 gigs of RAM as a 32 bit software, but that hopefully may change with the next version of FCP).

Then there's multiple cores/processors... On a MacPro with 8 cores, you can set up your machine to tap into all 8 cores in Motion/Compressor for the heavy duty work, whereas a MBP only has 2 cores to start with. The ability to tap into multiple cores should be easier with Grand Central in the next OS. Basically much faster render times for some work.



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Thank you.

I was also thinking of purchasing the "optimizing your fcp system book", does anyone know if the information in this book is current or is there a better publication and or website I should look into to learn the more technical side of setting up a rocking system.

i dont think there is really that much to "optimize" a tower for FCP. in my experience, the things to do are in this order:

- better data transfer (ie, going e-sata, scsi or fibre as opposed to firewire)
- more ram
- better video card

beyond that, you get into capture / monitoring cards and such. but that is on a user/needs basis and really doesnt impact overall "performance" much at all.

the discussion between macpro and macbook pro comes down to one question:
whats more important to you horsepower or portability. each comes at the cost of the other.

not to say that a macbook pro is a production slouch. i've done some side-by-side testing and a macbook pro is roughly on par with a G5 quad.

My personal theory of optimization is to keep the system entirely devoid of any not-absolutely-necessary software. My system has the required drivers (Kona, Caldigit, Tascam), Final Cut Studio, Adobe CS, iWork and absolutely nothing else.

Stuff can't cause a problem if it's not in the room in the first place.

I'm aware that I might be overly conservative here. But I have a hard time arguing with "it works."

im also with jeff. keep extraneous stuff to a minimum (if at all) no games, no music, no silliness.
i even keep my protools stuff on a second machine.

Oh, wait. Yeah. Music. I confess, I do have my iTunes library on my system, on a second drive. Not that I installed any actual software for that, just files. And I only did it because I'm incredibly lazy and I like being able to use my entire music collection as temp score.

yeah, some things like music, email and maybe something like quickbooks. if you only have one machine you kinda have to keep them there. but historically, ive never seen stuff like these cause problems - as long as you dont fill your drive to the gills with music. then youre in for problems... on that note (pun intended) another benefit of a tower is you can install separate internal drives - a great way to manage your music!

i should shut up now. im pretty sure jeff doesnt need me to validate all his thoughts ; )

Actually, I switched over to using Gmail entirely a few years back for that very reason: It's a Web app. Nothing needs to be installed.

We apps, when available for what you want to do, are great alternatives to installing software on your edit system. My company's timekeeping app is a Web app, for instance. And instead of using a desktop Twitter client, I just use the Twitter Web site.

I think I'm going to have to expand my list of necessary software to include Filemaker in the near future, though. I've been trying to find a way around it, and I keep coming up empty.

It's not the amount of stuff on your machine...has nothing to do with performance IMHO. On both my Tower & Macbook Pro I have an "Image Bank" folder of over 25 GB of stock images / animations / image sequences, over 300 music tracks, over 4000 fonts, plug-ins coming out of my ears, Adobe Production Premium, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Studio 2, Avid Express Pro, Cinema 4D Studio Bundle, Toast, Fetch, DigiDelivery & more. Both machines are on the internet every second they are running and I usually run at least 4 apps at once. I don't crash...don't even drop a frame. Why? Because I do fresh installs of everything at it's latest version and I stay up on updates. I make sure no corrupt software makes its way onto my systems.

Advantages of each? That was covered earlier:
Mobility = Macbook Pro. Expandability & raw power = Tower.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Totally, Joey, a system with more "stuff" on it can be rock-solid stable. It's just that I only have personal experience with systems configured the way I described above. I've got confidence in that configuration, so I stick with it. That's all it is, not objective truth.

"Experience is the best experience" - Yogi Berra

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

where "stuff" becomes a problem is when all the stuff gets your drive filled to within 10% of its capacity - unhappiness tends to follow from that point.