New College Student: Interests in Movies/Movie Critic

[cosmorocket]

Hi,

We are looking to purchase a Macbook Pro for our nephew starting College in the Fall. He would like to be a film critic. I am assuming he will get assignments for putting together 'short' movies for his classes. Just a guess. I not familiar with the cirriculum. Plus, we would like to see the Pro make it through 4 years of college. I am not a good reference point in this purchase since I have 2 mac minis.

Anyway, we could use some assistance. With a budget in mind, should we get him the Macbook Pro 13 2.3Ghz or Macbook Pro 2.7Ghz? How does video editing compare on 2.3Ghz vs. 2.7Ghz? I guess another way of asking is will the extra money spent on the 2.7Ghz be appreciable for video editing?

Thanks.

 

[chrismacguy]

1) This really needs to go into the MacBook Pro forum
2) You really need to know if hes doing Video Editing or not. Depending on the course, he may just be writing essays and doing film analysis on his personal machine and editing in a proper edit-suite, or he could be running software such as Final Cut Pro on his laptop.
3) For Video Editing - The better the CPU (More Cores, Faster Speed) you have, the faster you can render your produced video, however either of those would keep up with basic video editing tasks (If he was going to do Pro-Level Video Editing, the school would have specified that he have a Mac Pro or high-powered PC depending on college preference).

 

[jonnymo5]

If it is his only computer then don't get the 13 inch. Having more room to work will be very important. Otherwise if you want it to last through college get the absolute fastest thing you can afford. You can upgrade the ram later if you know how which will save some dollars for more cpu.

 

[chrismacguy]

If it is his only computer then don't get the 13 inch. Having more room to work will be very important. Otherwise if you want it to last through college get the absolute fastest thing you can afford. You can upgrade the ram later if you know how which will save some dollars for more cpu.

Erm, you can always hook up an external display - the 13 is perfect as you can take it just about anywhere, get back to the dorm and hook up a massive external display. If I didn't need my Mac Pros capability, Id happily just take my Air and Cinema Display and use that as my only machine.

 

[ActionableMango]

Any computer you want to last four years you should probably avoid the base models, especially a laptop which by nature does not have good upgrade paths. I'd get a small screen, fast CPU, and fast video. I'd supplement it with an external monitor and mouse. If the RAM proves to be insufficient, I'd upgrade that with third party RAM.

There are no guarantees, especially since you aren't sure exactly what he'll be doing. What will he be doing in a video class four years from now? Impossible to tell. I suspect however that homework assignments are a much lighter computer load than a professional would need. Getting the top of the line CPU and GPU will help stretch the laptop as far as possible.

Hopefully it will last the four years, but that's a long stretch, especially for video editing on a portable device.

 

[cosmorocket]

Thanks everyone.