Hi,

I have been shooting on MiniDV and Editing on Imovie with a Macbookpro leaving 50gb of free space on the hard drive which I solely use for transferring and editing the footage i have, mostly short films (max 30 mins of footage each to be edited).

I have now decided to go the next step and start shooting/editing more professionally with Final cut and HD cameras.

Do you have any recommendations?

How many Gb does 1 minute of high quality HD footage take?

Should I get myself the 500gb new macs to handle it( (they actually go up to 1tb, with up to 4gb ram and over 3.0 fast processors)? (or would I still need an external hard drive for maximum efficiency?)

Or would you just recommend to get a big external hard drive and work with Final cut on my laptop?

Any suggestions or sharing of your experiences would be very helpful.

Clearly I would prefer saving money, but I also want to elevate the quality of what I do! So I am open to your ideas.

Thanks

Alex

How many Gb does 1 minute of high quality HD footage take?
If you want RAW Uncompressed HD it can be upwards of 7GB a Minute.

Should I get myself the 500gb new macs to handle it( (they actually go up to 1tb, with up to 4gb ram and over 3.0 fast processors)? (or would I still need an external hard drive for maximum efficiency?)

If you don’t keep all your video on there I use 1Tb and transfer it all back to tape when I’m done so its not taking up disc space. I highly suggest a Mac Pro for the power because it takes quite a bit to edit true HD nicely. The Mac Pro’s are also nice because they are upgradeable, and they do hold more than 4gb of RAM mine can go up to 32gb of Ram and 4tb of Internal Storage, also they have 8-cores standard for their processors.

Chris,

Thanks for your reply.

Do you work with Raw or you compress a bit when you work?

Is this the machine you refer to (because it says it only goes up to 1 tb and 4gb - is there another one I don’t know of)?:
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/Z0FH?mco=NzMyNjM1

By the way when you edit, apart from final cut 2 pack, do you use photoshop or anything else?

Thanks

Alessandro

You linked to the iMac he was referring to the Mac Pro
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro?mco=MTIyMDY

The Mac Pro is the true desktop solution. I have one and love it for editing though Final Cut is still a little twitchy on me sometimes. As far as storage space goes I have 2 TB internally and then I am upgrading to a Drobo soon.

http://www.drobo.com

The nice thing about the drobo is that it can take up 16TB and is firewire 800. Also you can have two disks fail and still salavage your data (theoretically)