Is a Macbook up to running FCP?

Question

Hi all. I know FCP is a 'heavy' program and in an ideal world you would not want to mess about trying to use FCP on a Macbook (the specs are as listed for my machine), however my employers have recently requested that I be able to capture clips off a Sony 1080i arrange them into an order, compress as MPEG2 and FTP the resulting file from a Macbook.
We received instruction on a chunky MacPro in the office and all worked well, however out in the field when I tried the same on my Macbook it fails to capture - as soon as I click to capture a clip from the camera an error message appears that from memory says something like 'warning, data was lost from the last capture attempt' , and no video is captured. Any ideas why?
A friend told me one possible reason: " NEVER EVER use the drive that your OS is on to capture video. ALWAYS use an external drive. Its a total NO NO. Youll ruin your main drive. No one does it. Get an external. The system cannot access the video and run the OS as well this is true if both Macs and Pee Cee;'s''
Can anyone tell me if it is possible to do what I've been asked with a Macbook, I have access to a Lacie Rugged 7200 RPM drive but would have to use the USB port from my Macbook to connect to it as the firewire 400 port would be being used by the Sony camera.
Many thanks
Simon

Answer 1

An HDV camera records — surprise surprise — HDV. There are a number of different video formats out there, some exclusively for professional use and some that you might run into doing lower-end work.
HDV is arguably the lowest-end high-definition format. HDV cameras are generally cheaper (and of correspondingly lower quality) than most other cameras, with a few notable exceptions.
The trade-off HDV makes is that it really compresses the ever-lovin' heck out of the footage, storing it in very few bytes per second of data. But because the compression is so intense, it requires more processing to turn it back into video again when you play it back. That's why you'll hear people around here talk about shooting HDV but converting it to another format for editing. DVCPRO HD is a popular editing format, and ProRes 422's gaining.
That's one of the reasons why encoding your HDV footage on a MacBook will be an unsatisfying experience. It takes a lot of math to go from heavily compressed HDV footage to heavily compressed MPEG-2 footage, with a scaling operation in the middle. A lot of math means either a lot of CPUs or a long time.
Life's full of trade-offs.