Need help on deciding which Mac I should buy

Alright, so I have a very important decision I need to make and I really need help making it.
My two choices:
Choice 1: My first choice is that I have $1378 dollars to buy a MacBook. My choice is the MacBook air 13" with 128 GB hard drive, 8 GB Memory, and 1.7 GHz processor.
Choice 2: My Dad does not want his MacBook Air 11" base model from 2012. He is willing to give it to me. In return, I will give him the $1378 and he will buy himself a $400 laptop from that. Then he will buy me a 500 GB Thunderbolt hard drive and a thunderbolt to hdmi adaptor for the MacBook Air. The remaining money will then go to me.
Either choice I take, I need a computer fast enought to do serious video editing with Final Cut Pro and Multi-tasking. Also, it needs to last 3 years. Which choice should I take. I have one week to decide. Either way, my dad will pay for my Mac OS X Mavericks Update.

The processors in the new MacBook Airs are not that much more powerful than the 2012 models, the real difference is in the battery life. When you say your dad has the base model, I'm assuming that is the 4 GB RAM/64 GB SSD version. You would be cutting it close on storage space, but the external Thunderbolt drive would make up for that. 4 GB RAM is also cutting it close, especially for video editing, but I hear the flash storage on the MacBook Airs helps compensate for that.
If it were me, I would go with option 2, considering you should have a pretty good chunk of change left over once your dad buys his laptop and your Thunderbolt accessories.

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1. Three years ago I was advised to get a mini-tape machine because FCE does not work well with non-tape machines. This was confirmed in this discussion group recently.
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