What’s an ideal portable feature film editing solution? Can one edit an entire feature on say a Mac Mini with some external drives?
I posed this question to my friend, editor and fellow Mac head Neil Sadwelkar. This post will have our conversation. Neil hosts an excellent website devoted to non linear editing.
Dev,
Yes I’ve been thinking along those lines too. However, now after experiencing feature editing in FCP, I’ve found that for features and long films particularly, a more beefier processor and RAM is a must.
I’d like to edit a 90 minute feature film which originates on 35mm and is filmed with a 10:1 ratio.
Here’s Neil’s first answer:
Dev,
Yes I’ve been thinking along those lines too. However, now after experiencing feature editing in FCP, I’ve found that for features and long films particularly, a more beefier processor and RAM is a must. As are multiple and fast hard disks. Sadly that means the Mac mini, iBook, PBook are out. The lowest system you can get by for something over 90 mins final length is probably a iMac 20” among the “new” lot. Meaning if one is buying fresh.
Of legacy systems, at least a dual 1GHz or over with gobs of RAM is a must.
There is a definite and demonstrable difference in long timeline editing between even a DP G4/1.42 GHz with 1Gb RAM and a DP G5/2.5 GHz with 2 Gb RAM. The exact same project just chokes on a PBook 1.5GHz even with 1 Gb RAM (something that compares with a Mac mini)
The other pecularity of features is the amount of hard disk space required. 1 Tb is easily burnt in the avarage feature. Running multiple firewire hard disks to muster up that kind of space is fraught with danger.
I’d go with internal drives or external SATA anyday. And in in ideal world I’d take an XRAID as the most sevure solution for drive space. Recapture of media is just not an option in the event of drive failure.
Just some first thoughts.
Related posts:
I came across this while searching some old stuff. I’d like to add something to this.
Most of what I’d written about system spec needed for feature editing on small machines still holds – yesterday’s announcement on new Intel Macs notwithstanding.
Meaning, sometime now we’re going to see Intel Macminis as well. So the question would be. Now that Macs are Intel and hence many times faster, can we do feature editing on Intel Minis or MacBooks?
The answer in the short term seems to still be a “No”. That’s because FCP is not yet Intel native, so its going to run via some emulation that probably makes it slower than on existing PowerPC mased Macs. Rosetta or something they call it. But come March, we’ll be able to trade in our existing FCP DVDs and get a Intel native FCP for just $ 50. That should do the trick.
So I guess when all this software porting thing settles down, by about March ‘06 I think I’ll be able to ‘qualify’ an FCP system to run on a MacBook and do an entire feature on it.
I’ll have begun editing a feature by then, so, if some kind soul from Apple or something loans me a MacBook or an iMac, I’ll sure put it through the grinds of a real feature edit, so by July I should be able to say “It works … I’ve done it!”
Any takers?
Neil Sadwelkar
11 Jan 06