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Laptop Choices

Ron Mac

Ron Mac

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I was looking at replacing my old G4 laptop (about 2.5 yrs old) with a new 2.8 15" Mac Pro laptop.
I need to mostly for DIT work on location. Transferring, previewing dailies... the usual. Any thoughts?

Thanks!
Ron
:emote_hippie:
 
Expresscard slot

Expresscard slot

You absolutely need to get one with an express card slot. (Current shipping versions do not have one)

So buy an older model or step up to the 17" model which does include one.

Best,

Steve
 
Ron Mac said:
a new 2.8 15" Mac Pro laptop.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I'm looking at getting except I'll need to edit on it. I know that Firewire 800 is slower than ExpressCard but what is the real cost of not having it? What are you not going to be able to do without an ExpressCard slot?
 
I think my older 17" has a slot. So maybe I'll just use that one.
 
Bit the bullet on the 17" MBP today. It's a large chunk of change but I believe it is the best overall choice for me. It has all the connectivity necessary to backup, a great screen for reviewing footage or showing off your finished product. It also is able to use the power of the Red Rocket thru the ExpressCard slot (coming soon).

There may be several PC alternatives for this but if you want a Mac, the 17" is the best way to go for now. It's a shame that they have removed some of the functionality of the 15' models.
 
There are several advantages to the Express card34 slot.
One is multiple connectivity: you can adapt it to be several other connection ports with an adapter and not lose any band width as it uses an independent high band width PCI lane. Good luck finding a FW800 hub...
Second is variety: Using adapters you can adapt it to be what ever compliant port you want.
Third is the band width potential as you can connect using any adapter utilizing the PCI Express lane at 2.5GBit per second in either direction FW800 restricted to a theoretical 800MBps.
Forth would be future proofing your connectivity: When FW3200 and or USB3 (5600MBps) become readily available and commonly used (who knows Redram drives with FW3200 and or USB3 ports sounds pretty sweet to me) you may well be purchasing a new machine. But if you still are using your old one you will be able to use much of the port's band width via an Express card 34 slot adapter.

It is worth while hunting down the late 08 new gen 15" MBP all be it they have the last gen battery with a minor bat life improvement. But they have the faster front side bus (1066MHZ), RAM expansion of up to 8GB, improved processor power (2.53, 2.66,2.8GHZ) and the better/more video cards (2XNVidia that are 9400M and 9600M with 256mb each) of the latest MBP release (early 09). With an Express card 34 slot. Which is exactly what I did and boy was it a performance improver on set from a DIT P.O.V...
Good luck.
 
Thanks, Nir, those are all good points, some of which I hadn't through of. Why, Apple, why did you remove that slot!?!

I had one idea today, perhaps a RAID with gigabit ethernet and a short CAT6 cable would be faster than one with FW800?
 
Joseph Hutson said:
Because they said an extremely small percentage of their MBP customers used the ExpressSlot, and with the amount of photograhers using the MBP's, an SD slot would have been more appealing to the bigger majority of consumers.
Click to expand...

But surely most (pro) photographers would be using Compact Flash cards, wouldn't they? So the SD slot doesn't make much sense on the 15 inch version... On the 13 inch, sure, but I think that the ExpressCard slot would be a lot more useful for a lot of people...

Alternatively, they could just put Esata on the side - would solve a lot of problems... And failing that, at least we should have USB3 in a year or two, which should be faster than Esata.
 
It is a shame that the new 15" doesn't have the express card slot. I am typing this off the new 15" MBP but know that this will not be the system I use in the field.

If not wed to Apple to for on site DIT work, I have been playing with two alternative PC's that are each great in their own way:

The HP 8730 notebook. Both size express cards on board, eSata, HDMI (not a mini), and DreamColor screen. Very easy and fast to move media, monitor it, and put it on another drive for backup. I plug the card in - copy to the eSata. When I bring the laptop back, I can plug straight into my 24" DreamColor to do even more refined color work.

1 Beyond. Just starting to take a look at this one. The transcode times are crazy fast - Product Manager tells me using MetaFuze to create dailies has been under 1.5x real time. I will report more on this when I get some "me" time on it.

I load MacDrive on these so my media can go anywhere depending on client. Now if Apple offered ProRes encoding on windows... that would make either of these kick ass systems on set. Personally I use both platforms all the time in my work - my desktop editing system is an HP, and use my MBP for travel editing. I have VMware to run MetaFuze and other Windows based tools I may need along the way.

Flexibility and time. Which is what you want to offer when providing services to clients.



Michael
 
AndrewGentle said:
Haha, you're probably right! We'll see what happens after Snow Leopard comes out.
Click to expand...

I think the "lack of mobility" thing is kind of joke (to me personally). I take my MBP 17" out of the house 3-4 times a week with no problem.

I think I have only 2 complaints about this generation of MBP's.

(1) Lack of FW400 (my workaround is to capture via FW800 and THEN archive it on an external hard-drive rather than capturing via FW400 and to my external drive in the first place). What I SHOULD do, since the Scarlet will demand it anyway, is get my Express/34 to SATA converter and use that as my connection to the external drive.

(2) The keys (keyboard) seem SO cheap. On the earlier gen MBP, you could tell the difference between the MacBooks and the MacBook PRO's because of the solid build. Now, all of the keys act and feel like the cheapo depot 13" MacBook keys.

But, maybe these thing had to be changed to save us $400. If that was the case, I am perfectly fine with that. :driving:
 
Joseph Hutson said:
(2) The keys (keyboard) seem SO cheap. On the earlier gen MBP, you could tell the difference between the MacBooks and the MacBook PRO's because of the solid build. Now, all of the keys act and feel like the cheapo depot 13" MacBook keys.
Click to expand...

I quite like the keyboard... I have an old 13 inch black plastic MacBook and if feels pretty good as far as laptop keyboards go!
 
I have to disagree..the new macbook keys feel nicer then the old ones...

Although i definitely agree on the firewire 800...i've been doing a firewire 400 to firewire 800...
 
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