Need help picking Mac Book specifications for FCP

Question

Okay. . .dumb beginners question here:
Which MacBook and how should it be configured would you order to run latest version of FCP?
I'm ready to order one and to order FCP.
TIA
Pending     Pending

Answer 1

agreed. a MacBook Pro is what you will need if you wish to take full advantage of all the software in the FCS1 bundle, even more so for FCS2.
My preference is for the 17". Although obviously larger and heavier, it has the screen real estate that you need for the Pro apps.
Internal hard disc, bigger but slower or smaller and faster? I'd go for the bigger but slower (unless you can get one of those new 200GB 7200rpm toshiba drives which is best of both worlds). Why wouldn't I go for the 7200 Rpm ? Well first, my internal is not my media drive. Even so, I've never actually had a problem with the slower laptop drives for capture or playback at a pinch, but I may have just been lucky in that regard. So, for me, given that discs have a habit of filling up with crap, and given it is not my primary media drive, then bigger is better.
RAM? As much as you can afford. 3GB is the current limit for the MBP's.
As we all know, OSes and app's have a RAM hungry nature which seems to know no bounds. As things progress, 3GB will not seem like so much.
External media drive? Yes of course, highly recommended. If you don’t have one then your internal disc will be eaten up by clip media in no time (especially if you opted for the smaller faster internal disc... And, as noted above, if you get an external drive for your media then the speed of your internal drive is les of an issue). There are a number of options for external HD. There is one primary questions that you need to answer. Do you envisage needing to edit in the field without any access to a power supply ?
If the answer is “yes”, then you need to buy a “bus-powered” solution ie one that can be powered just by plugging it into the laptop. This limits you to using a laptop hard disc in an external Firewire enclosure. As mentioned before, laptop drives have a smaller capacity than their desktop cousins (and they’re more expensive). The best bus-powered solution is either G-Technology’s “G-RAID Mini” or Lacie’s “Little Big Disk”. Both contain 2x160GB hard discs in a hardware RAID, and connect via Firewire 800. This makes them very fast, and gives them a larger capacity (320GB). They are very reliable but also very expensive. Single disc solutions are of course much cheaper. You can buy these from the big brand names too (Lacie’s “Rugged” line are supposed to be hard wearing), or you need not go with a ‘brand name’ drive at all. You can buy the discs and Firewire based drive enclosures separately in most computer malls, and then put them together yourself. These would not be RAID solutions of course, so not as fast and not the same capacity ... But much cheaper.
If “bus-powered” is not necessary then your other choices expand significantly. Currently the best (and fastest) option would be an SATA RAID. This requires using an ExpressCard/34 eSATA adapter in the laptop to provide the eSATA interface for the RAID. SATA drives/interface are very much faster than Firewire. You could add a single drive or an entire eSATA RAID. If SATA is overkill for your needs then you can choose a external firewire drive. My drive of choice for this is G-Technology’s “G-RAID” which has a large capacity, and is fast and very reliable. Again, its not cheap.
Don’t buy a USB harddrive. They cannot maintain a fast enough sustained data rate such as is needed for working with video.