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Test Drive: MacBook Pro vs. Mac Pro, Part 2

Sep 24, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Rendering

As I mentioned above, the desktop produced most files in about half the time of the notebook, which is not surprising given that the desktop has two 3.0GHz processors, each faster than the 2.4GHz processor in the MacBook. These results are presented in Table 1.

This tells me that both programs are effectively leveraging the available processor resources. While you never know until you test, this should mean that an eight-core system should significantly outperform a four-core system.

Overall, both systems proved very impressive during my tests. The MacBook Pro is an outstanding portable editing platform, especially if you can delay final rendering till you’re back in the shop. The Mac Pro, especially decked out with dual Cinema displays (and Matrox MXO), is a wonderful editing station for polishing your production with ferocious rendering capabilities.

Improving Notebook Editing Efficiency

Here are some tips for improving your efficiency while on the road.

1. Find the right external drive solution. Here are the respective speeds for the most relevant external drive solutions.

• FireWire (1394a): 400Mbps
• USB 2.0: 480Mbps
• FireWire 800 (1394b): 800Mpbs
• Serial ATA 1.5: 1.5Gbps

For most single-stream projects, using the USB 2.0 connector provides adequate speed and good access to inexpensive drives. The next easiest upgrade is FireWire 800 because current Macs and MacBooks have these ports. For multiple-stream projects, and/or fast transfers once back in the office, SerialATA is obviously worth looking into. You can buy an external Serial-ATA (eSATA) card for your MacBook Pro for less than $50, and there are a number of drives that support both USB 2.0 and eSATA. Google eSATA and “external hard disk” for a start.

2. Bring a good mouse and mouse pad. It sounds silly, but tiny portable mouses are much harder to manipulate, and on some surfaces (such as glass) editing without a mousepad is torture.

3. Get keyboard stickers. If you use a Bella or similar keyboard with shortcut labels on its keys while editing in your office, purchase a set of keyboard stickers (less than $20) to insert on your notebook.

4. Plan for external preview. If there’s a TV or other analog device around, you may be able to connect to it via a HDV camcorder and FireWire, Apple’s DVI to Video Adapter, or a device such as the Matrox MXO, so bring the necessary cables and ancillary gear. External preview will free up some real estate from your notebook screen. Don’t forget the DVI to VGA Adapter Apple ships with the MacBook Pro in case you have access to an older monitor or LCD panel.

5. Make your screen as readable as possible. Get familiar with display options such as Final Cut Pro’s browser text size setting (in User Preferences), which makes browser text much more readable in relatively cramped MacBook Pro screens.

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.