Will I be able to tell?

[Ivabign]

I just picked up a new MBP 13" 2.3 (current version) for $999 at microcenter. I saved a good $200 on it and I was wondering - I can pick up a Kingston 128GB SSD and upgrade my RAM to 8G for about the $200 I saved (a bit more - but real close)
My question is - will I be able to tell the difference (I will be doing some iMovie editing mostly)

And would it be worth the $200?

Thanks

 

[simsaladimbamba]

The SSD will make a difference, but it is not advised to have the footage you are editing on the same physical HDD/SSD as the OS resides on.

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[goMac]

The SSD will make a difference, but it is not advised to have the footage you are editing on the same physical HDD/SSD as the OS resides on.

I'd only worry about a separate drive if you were a more serious editor. For just working in iMovie you don't need two drives.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

I'd only worry about a separate drive if you were a more serious editor. For just working in iMovie you don't need two drives.

That may be true, but 120GB is not really much if one uses more than three hours of AIC encoded footage anyway.
But for the normal user, using the internal HDD might be fine, but I always used dedicated HDDs for footage, even when I began editing in the late 90s with Premiere Pro, thus my recommendation and slight prejudice.

 

[Ivabign]

That may be true, but 120GB is not really much if one uses more than three hours of AIC encoded footage anyway.
But for the normal user, using the internal HDD might be fine, but I always used dedicated HDDs for footage, even when I began editing in the late 90s with Premiere Pro, thus my recommendation and slight prejudice.

Then maybe use the ssd externally?

 

[goMac]

That may be true, but 120GB is not really much if one uses more than three hours of AIC encoded footage anyway.
But for the normal user, using the internal HDD might be fine, but I always used dedicated HDDs for footage, even when I began editing in the late 90s with Premiere Pro, thus my recommendation and slight prejudice.

Yeah, but this is iMovie. I used to edit with iMovie on much smaller drives.

Get an external normal drive for backing up projects. Keep the SSD in the laptop. Don't worry about separate drives while editing.

 

[jtopp]

120 gigs is small for editing video. If you have several hours of video or multiple projects, you will find the space limiting. You have to factor in other things like your other applications, media and if you will be using this as a main computer.

Hd video, depending on thenformat can take up huge gobs of your HArd disk. I would get a sad and the ram but also plan to get an external hd eventually for archival of media and footage. It is best to edit on an external drive but the MacBook and sad should be fast enough to take care of it without noticing.