2006 Macbook Pro 15" for Phocus?

[Rasool]

Hi all,

I have the H3D-39 and am using a Mac Pro 8 core machine for editing.  I'm looking to pick up an inexpensive used laptop to shoot tethered to on location.  Are any of you using an older macbook pro 15" 1.83GHz or 2GHz?  How's the performance?  I won't be using an external monitor with it.

Thanks,

Rasool

[Phil G]

Hi Rasool

When I first received my H3D I had a G4 15" Power Book 2GB RAM I loaded Phocus v1  against the advice of HBlad Area Manager but it worked and he was able to demonstrate using it tethered  with a 120mm lens

OK it works but is slow later versions of Phocus have improved its performance but not much so I would think that later Mac Book Pro models should work

I later purchased a refurbished 17 " Mac Book Pro  the pre unibody one suggest you check out the Refurbished offers on the Apple site

Phil

[horseoncoboy]

i have the old 17" 2007 and the new 17" 2009 macbook pro with phocus the speed difference is huge because of the much faster graphic card in the newer one.

[Phil G]

Hi Rasool

Just got back to studio and checked the old 15" is a 1.67GHz PowerPC G4 with 2GB DDR2 SDRAM.  Graphics Card ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB RAM this is one of the last revisions released in October 2005 and was my first Mac
An introduction which made me wonder why I had not switched earlier 

As I said Phocus it runs on it but I would not like to have to use it for long (and it would be long) except in an emergency

So get a Mac Book Pro the 15" is a little more portable,  I would go for one with the fastest graphics card as more and more applications are using the graphics card rather than the fast CPU ( which is often not the bottleneck) fully populate it with RAM and you can use an external SATA striped drive which is often cheaper than trying to upgrade the internal drive.

And don't forget to check out the Apple online Store Refurbished products

Hope that helps

Phil

[Rasool]

Thanks for the replies.

Apple have a refurbished 13" macbook pro for 1199.  I wonder how good it will be for phocus?  Hmmm...