Hi Laura, The standard answer is: it depends.
If this is going to be your primary or only workstation and you are doing fairly serious production work, then go for the best you can afford. You'd have to bump up to the $1300 MacBook to get a DVD burner and the integrated graphics card is not officially supported for Final Cut Studio 2. It might run it, but I imagine not very well. Add $700 for the Pro and you get -a better graphics card (shared video memory vs 128MB dedicated VRAM) -double the memory (1GB vs 2GB) with a higher capacity (2GB vs 4GB) -(barely) faster CPU (2.16GHz vs 2.2GHz) -more screen real estate (1280x800 vs 1440x900) Is that worth $700? It depends =) If you are doing simple movies for family and friends, probably not, a MacBook would be great. But if you're doing heavy lifting with video and this was going to be your only video editing work station it would be worth it to me. Only you can decide if iMovie or FCE is enough for you. iMovie comes with it so try it out. You can do a lot with iMovie but it is pretty basic. I started with iMovie and after pushing it as far as I could I went to FCE. Now, I'm really starting to eye Final Cut Studio 2. Peace out, -- Kary Rogers http://goodcommitment.tv On Jun 20, 2007, at 12:18 PM, Laura Moncur wrote: > I am switching from my PC to Mac and I'm trying to decide if the new > MacBook Pros with the NVidia video chips are worth an extra $1000. > Have any of you noticed a big difference between the MacBook Pros and > the normal MacBooks? > > It takes forever to render a DVD on my PC using Adobe Premiere > Elements and I'm hoping to streamline the process. > > Additionally, is Final Cut Pro worth the extra $600 or should I just > go with Final Cut Express or even iMovie/iDVD? I am having a hard time > justifying the expense to my husband. Can you give me any ammunition? >
