[MacDV] Re: Mac Book Pro vs. G4

[sb]

The 17" MacBook Pro is at least twice as fast as your G4. If you are editing
DV material, you actually only need a 5400rpm hard drive.

However, if you are using FCExpress, you really should NOT use your internal
boot disk as the capture scratch disk anyway.

So, if I were in your situ, I would buy the laptop, and maybe replace the
smallest external drive with a bigger one. I would buy Seagates, since they
have a 5 year warranty.
I would also look towards using the eSATA connections, instead of the
IDE/firewire.
For a laptop, you buy an eSATA ExpressCard adapter and then you can connect
the external drives with SATA external case to it.
SATA is much faster than FW, and you keep your drives on a separate bus from
your camera.

 btw, all the Firewire ports are actually running off the same FW bus, so
the number of ports doesn't really matter.

 hth,

 sb


On 7/20/06 11:25 AM, "Robert & Susan Lloyd" <lloyds at vermontel.net> wrote:

> I have been making videos using a G4 dual tower 1.67GHz, FCE HD, with
> several external firewire hard drives, an external vcr and a TV
> monitor.  It has 256 KB L2 cache (per cpu), 2 MB L3 cache (per cpu), 1
> GB memory, a bus speed of 133 MHz. One internal ATA drive of 74.53 GB,
> an internal Maxtor drive of 189.92 GB.  Three external firewire drives,
> two at 500 GB and one at 112 GB.  This all seems to work fine at the
> moment.  There are two firewire ports, two USB ports.
> 
> BUT I am off the grid, using solar power, and the power consumption of
> this setup is significant, requiring me to run the backup generator
> frequently -- long term wear on the propane generator and the system
> batteries.  I live in Vermont, so solar power year round is limited.
> 
> I am wondering whether shifting to a 17" Mac Book Pro might save me
> considerable power on the computer (not the external drives).  The spec
> sheets suggest a maximum power consumption of 4.6 amps at 18.5 volts dc,
> which looks like 85 watts to me.   In contrast, the G4 line input is
> listed as 8 amps at 120 volts ac, which looks like 960 watts (can this
> be true? I can't believe it uses all that power!), with the ADC monitor
> out put of 25 volts dc at 4 amps = 100 watts.
> 
> Setting aside the cost for the moment, my main question is whether the
> 17" Mac Book Pro will adequately fill my video editing needs without
> glitches.  Compoared to the G4 Dual, the CPU is faster (2.16 GHz), the
> internal Hard Drive is smaller (100 GB vs.  260 GB).  Or can I get away
> with the 5400 rpm, 120 GB hard drive?  It can support 2 GB memory, 2GB
> L2 storage, and some other good things.  If I make the switch from G4 to
> Mac Book, will I regret it?
> 
> TIA.
> 
> BobLL
> 
> 
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