Which Apple laptop on set?

[Karel Bata]

I know, I know, I could do a search here, but the answer to this question is always changing, right?

I'm torn between finding

1 - a decent minimum spec Apple laptop to safely download Red One files to hard drives on set, or to take the leap to

2 - A really good all 'round Mac laptop that also runs FCP and AE (without my blowing tons of dosh on some extra bit of speed that at the end of the day adds not a lot).

What's a good choice in either category? Any takers? :001_cool:

 

[Jonathan Stevenson]

I say go for the nice mac that you can use on set and at home. Plus with CS5 being 64-bit, you don't need a super duper beefed up system to still have a fast workflow. The biggest downside to the current Mac laptops is the lack of a PCI express port, which basically restricts you to only using FW800 drives on set (not a huge deal, IMO). The new 15" Macbook Pro would be a good all-around machine. Perhaps the 2.53ghz? This would be just fine, especially if you're not shooting huge client gigs that require massive RAID backups, on-set color grading, all the blah-blah.

 

[PatrickW]

Get the 17" because it has express card and therefore USB3 or eSATA as you require.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Get the 17" because it has express card and therefore USB3 or eSATA as you require.

Exactly. 17" all the way.

That said, I prefer the 15" for it's size, but now use the 17" because of the expresscard slot situation. :angry:

 

[Jonathan Stevenson]

Exactly. 17" all the way.

That said, I prefer the 15" for it's size, but now use the 17" because of the expresscard slot situation. :angry:

See, for me, at the end of the day, the difference in speed between FW800 and eSata isn't enough to make me want to buy a big stupid 17" laptop. They're ridiculously priced and HUGE. You may as well carry an iMac around set I'd much rather just deal with FW800 (which is fast enough for me).

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The problem isn't the FW800 not being fast enough. It's that there's only one FW host on the system. I know plenty of people who don't use eSATA, but simply use the EC34 slot to add a second FW800 bus. Sure, you can chain multiple devices to a single FW port, but you are cutting your bandwidth each time you do. To offload a RED Drive at about full speed, you have to connect it via FW800 and then pipe that to a separate FW800 or eSATA hosted device. You could always go to internal storage, but that's always limited.

Other than that, I want my ExpressCard back on the 15" MBP! Hopefully LightPeak will come soon and solve these issues.

Funny thing about the iMac... It is inferior for connectivity compared to the 17" MBP. It only has one FW800 and one USB2 host plus ethernet -- same as the 13" and 15" MBP. If Apple would put an expansion slot in the iMac, it could very well replace a Mac Pro for a lot of situations.

USB2 is too slow for most real-world use on set. There is no way to round trip any of the RED media fast enough with USB2. It's often a challenge with FW800.

 

[J. Eric Camp]

Listen to Jeff. He only speaks the truth.

 

[Karel Bata]

Interesting debate guys.

I'm used to PCs, and this business of being stuck with whatever slots Apple decides are appropriate is a bit weird to me. I was expecting more options at the Apple Store. Not so. Basically there's only three models to choose from! Lovely machines though, and the time really has come for me to get one. No indication on Apple's site of their weight...

 

[Jonathan Stevenson]

Jeff, You win. I should've never tried to enter a geek-off against you!! I am not worthy.

 

[Hank Braxtan]

I'm transferring files on a set right now, and have had to resort to using two laptops just to keep up. I have a MBP with a firewire800 card reader going out to dual G Raid via USB 2.0, and I have an old Fujitsu running windows 7 with a USB 2.0 card reader going out to dual G Raids via USB 2.0. (This one was supposed to be for backup)

Guess which one is faster?

The fujitsu is killing the macbook, even with the firewire 800 card reader. I bought the fujitsu in 2008 for $500. Transfer rates for the macbook setup are about 1.6minutes per GB, while the Fujitsu is amazingly, about 1 minute per GB.

I'd like to get a system in place that's faster, but laptops seem to be dumbed down these days (only including a couple ports, and often no expansion or PCI slots). I guess I'll have to wait for USB 3.0.

I'd like to find something better.

 

[PatrickW]

Interesting debate guys.

I'm used to PCs, and this business of being stuck with whatever slots Apple decides are appropriate is a bit weird to me. I was expecting more options at the Apple Store. Not so. Basically there's only three models to choose from! Lovely machines though, and the time really has come for me to get one. No indication on Apple's site of their weight...

13" = 4.5 pounds
15" = 5.6 pounds
17" = 6.6 pounds

source: http://www.apple.com/ca/macbookpro/specs-17inch.html

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff, You win. I should've never tried to enter a geek-off against you!! I am not worthy.

HAHA... :laugh:

Karel, you could always go with a PC laptop. The reason most of us keep a Mac on set with RED is because the latest RED tools are always released on the Mac first and it was the better platform for immediate workflow until very recently. It's not as big of an issue now that REDCINE-X builds for Windows are almost concurrent with Windows and there are more PC workflow options.

I keep both Mac and PC laptops handy. If the job warrants it, I'll roll a Mac Pro on set, but that rarely happens in my world.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

USB 3.0 ExpressCard 2

USB 3.0 ExpressCard 2

Belkin USB 3.0 ExpressCard 2

Can work on Windows XP, Vista or & at MacBook Pro and still have to check it out how is going with Mac OS X and USB 3.0 driver...???!!!

"Belkin allows users to throw a couple of USB 3.0 ports into a desktop with its PCIe Add-In Card, supporting daisy chaining
of up to 127 plug and play devices and allowing your system to benefit from more efficient power usage.
Laptop users can achieve similar results by popping in the ExpressCard adapter."

LINK>>>

 

[Julian Krause]

If one isn´t afraid of fiddling around a bit,
a mac mini could be another solution...

http://www.erebos.net/34/

I work on a simple copystation on mac mini base at the moment, where I put the mac and a cheap display into a Pelicase. Hope that works.

Otherwise I´d go for the 17" MBP with SSD for the reasons explained above =)

 

[Alex G. Cohn]

I'm transferring files on a set right now, and have had to resort to using two laptops just to keep up. I have a MBP with a firewire800 card reader going out to dual G Raid via USB 2.0, and I have an old Fujitsu running windows 7 with a USB 2.0 card reader going out to dual G Raids via USB 2.0. (This one was supposed to be for backup)

Guess which one is faster?

The fujitsu is killing the macbook, even with the firewire 800 card reader. I bought the fujitsu in 2008 for $500. Transfer rates for the macbook setup are about 1.6minutes per GB, while the Fujitsu is amazingly, about 1 minute per GB.

I'd like to get a system in place that's faster, but laptops seem to be dumbed down these days (only including a couple ports, and often no expansion or PCI slots). I guess I'll have to wait for USB 3.0.

I'd like to find something better.

You're using USB 2.0 to connect the Hard Drives? I would expect the PC to be faster than the Mac in those circumstances.

You would probably be better off plugging the G-Raid into the Mac through Firewire 800, and chaining the card reader off of the G-Raid.

 

[Hank Braxtan]

You're using USB 2.0 to connect the Hard Drives? I would expect the PC to be faster than the Mac in those circumstances.

You would probably be better off plugging the G-Raid into the Mac through Firewire 800, and chaining the card reader off of the G-Raid.

You wanna know what's crazier? I plugged the same setup into a Velocity Micro desktop (core i7 950 @3.07GHz, 9.00 GB of RAM) USB 2.0 card reader to USB 2.0 G-Raid. It took 35 minutes (!!!!) to transfer 10.7 GB.

 

[Hank Braxtan]

You're using USB 2.0 to connect the Hard Drives? I would expect the PC to be faster than the Mac in those circumstances.

You would probably be better off plugging the G-Raid into the Mac through Firewire 800, and chaining the card reader off of the G-Raid.

Also, the problem with the MBP is that it only has one firewire800 port, and only 2 USB ports.

Personally, I like to transfer data to two external drives at once (you know, for backup). I wonder if it would be worth the bandwidth loss to daisy chain two hard drives to the 1394B AND the card reader? I imagine it would be slower than my current setup.

 

[J. Eric Camp]

If you are serious about transfer and are looking at a current gen mac laptop then you have no choice but a 17". You NEED the express card port. No debate. You then buy whatever flavor of express card you want (fw800, eSATA) (I carry both). This gives you the native fw800 port for ingest and two ports on the express card for dual copies.

 

[Hank Braxtan]

If you are serious about transfer and are looking at a current gen mac laptop then you have no choice but a 17". You NEED the express card port. No debate. You then buy whatever flavor of express card you want (fw800, eSATA) (I carry both). This gives you the native fw800 port for ingest and two ports on the express card for dual copies.

This.

 

[Alex G. Cohn]

Also, the problem with the MBP is that it only has one firewire800 port, and only 2 USB ports.

Personally, I like to transfer data to two external drives at once (you know, for backup). I wonder if it would be worth the bandwidth loss to daisy chain two hard drives to the 1394B AND the card reader? I imagine it would be slower than my current setup.

I think that 2 chained FW800 drives + Card Reader would probably be faster than USB 2.0, at least on Mac.

But you would have to test it.