get the 2.5ghz, 512mb. if your doing video, spend the money. well worth it. look for a discount. i got one from my job.

One important (and easy to miss) difference between the 2.4gHz and 2.5gHz MacBook Pro's: the 2.4 has a 3mb L2 cache, while the 2.5 has 6mb L2 cache. Depending on the application, that can make a substantial difference in speed. Not sure whether or not 256 versus 512mb makes any difference for Video-SL....it might help other applications like Final Cut and Pixelmator that make a lot of use of the GPU.

For Video-SL, even the non-pro MacBook's seem perfectly capable. I personally much prefer the smaller size, not to mention the lower price and easier ability to change out the hard drive.

If you want one "does everything" computer (desktop replacement, basically) then the MacBook Pro's are probably more appropriate. Part of my decision to get the non-Pro MacBook is that I have a Mac Pro in the studio for the more CPU-intensive stuff.

believe me I am I'm getting a teacher discount but still.. Are you using any pro audio apps?? If so how well is it working..

Now from what I've read with the macbook you don't get all the transitions. I've never used it so I cannot say...

Yeah I am looking for my machine to do it all so thats why I'm looking at the MBP.. the fw800 I think will make a big difference for audio.

yeah it will if you need to run like 24 channels of audio simultaneous. i've personally never needed more than about 8 channels AT THE SAME TIME which runs flawless using Logic on my G4 500Mhz and my 12 inch powerbook G4.

oh yeah, and that's all over FW400.

I do get all the effects and transitions on the MacBook, and the Video-SL info displays "No Restrictions" under graphics. I think the older MacBooks (before November 2007, pre-Santa Rosa, used the older less-powerful graphics processing) were restricted on some stuff.



The only pro-audio app I've so far installed on the MacBook is Peak Pro 5.2. It runs fine. One thing worth considering is that the pro-audio apps aren't particularly taxing graphically. It's when you get into the video stuff like Final Cut/Motion (applications that do make specific use of the GPU) that you really want/need the dedicated graphics cards.



For many channels of audio streaming from a hard drive or to/from an audio interface, yes. For SSL, or even Video-SL, the only real-world benefit of FW800 over FW400 would be a slight decrease (possibly completely un-noticeable) in loading times for tracks. Even playing two h.264 videos at the same time, and recording the audio mix back to the same hard drive, you're nowhere near taxing the bandwidth of FW400. There's enough cacheing going on in SSL, especially at higher settings within SSL and Video-SL, that the drive that files are playing from is sitting idle most of the time, something easy to see from the drive-activity light on an external enclosure.

Like I said earlier though...if your want is for one computer for everything, probably the MacBook Pro is a better choice...especially if as you said before you want to "start dabbling into video". Leaving the video aside, the basic MacBook would make a perfectly decent "desktop-replacement" with a bigger external monitor connected.

I think I'm just going to go with the entry level Macbook Pro and upgrade the ram later. Yeah for SSL a macbook (I have a macbook 2.0ghz also works fine)would be suffice but for audio programs bigger is always better, I normally push 32 tracks and I love those pluggins...Hence the reason that fw800 should come in handy. Anybody know any websites with good MBP reviews. Macworld has a good article...maybe too early yet.

Firewire 800 probably has less risk than FW400 of choking on 32 tracks of audio. It won't make any difference either way for plug-ins (they just use the host CPU, unless you have dedicated DSP).

If you're using a lot of plug-ins, a bigger screen is definitely useful. On my Pro Tools system that I run on a Mac Pro, the second screen is dedicated entirely to plug-ins. Nice for keeping the editing window clear, while still seeing plug-in settings/meters/etc.

Yeah a second monitor is always nice to have. I use to have one on my pro tools rig too. I'm actually moving away from PT... Just such a pain... editing is super easy so I'll miss that but man they get you for everything. 32 track limitation or spend thousands for HD....hardware to use software oh and then they do us the favor to provide us with a mbox micro a $250 dongle. Then ilok... I could go on.... Well I'm moving to Logic with apogee converters I think I'll be just fine.

i was just going to do a shameless plug for logic, but treeo beat me to it.

I have the new 2.4 model, and it runs everything absolutely flawlessly. I am also an Ableton user, and I've been testing Video SL; they both run with no problems. Video SL is sooo smooth on this machine. I think I am going to upgrade it to 4gb, basically for my peace of mind, but even with 2gb everything runs great.

thats good to hear Brett... I actually went to the apple store yesterday to go check it out and the screen is actually pretty big too. I've been using my macbook and a dell 14in for awhile now and I guess I got use to to them. That 24in Imac looks sweet too.

Yeah Logic was smart in droppping the price, makes people want to buy a new computer. But thats OK

I'd like to know whether this has an impact with SSL and VSL.



Just to confirm... you have all the effects in full quality? Like none of the effects saw "low" in brackets behind the effect name?

Ok here is the breakdown in differences....

the 2.4 for starters can only support a Serial ATA drive operating at 1.5 gigabytes per second, the 2.5 and 2.6 can operate at 3.0 gb/ps because its now operating using SATA 2 instead of SATA 1

the 2.4 mainboard bus speed is 677 ... the 2.6 and 2.6 are now 800 mhz bus's which will help with proc load....along with the increased speed of the hard drive

the video card in the 2.4 and 2.5 is the sameee damn thing just 512 in the newer macbook pro... same GPU speeds, same everything, but now just more dedicated memory for video... which will help a little.

ALSO just a little side note for those people wanting a 17 inch aside from the 15... just remember to take into consideration that the 17 inch models WILL run Video SL slower... why you ask? its because your main display is running at a higher resolution then the 15 inch, the 17 inch runs at like 1900 or so and the 15 runs at like 1400ish, so with the same video card running on both machines the 15 will perform better because its main display is easier on the video card for your main display and therefore can now output better and faster to your Secondary display....

well anyways thats my input on the subject... ohh and yes i didnt wanna repeat but the L2 Cache is now 6 megs from 3... which does make a decent difference

so overall... i have a maxed out 2.4 gig machine, runs video SL ok...i personally wanna buy the new one and sell this one... so if anyone interested in a 2.4 4 gigs ram 7200 rpm 200 gig hard drive 17 inch macbook pro for 2400 bucks let me know =P lol

Everything else you said is pretty correct, but that is simply not true. When using at a regular gig, the actual output of VSL is going to be the same resolution (for example, if you're outputting to the RCA/S-Video adapter, you're going to be running that port at 720x480 no matter what). The main display is slightly higher resolution, but the extremely small difference in graphics memory/processing used there is not even enough to calculate. Remember, it's not like a video game where higher resolution always means less performance. You're just putting static pixels on the screen, like the text of your crates, and everything else in the interface except for the preview (which also has no change in actual resolution, no matter what your screen resolution is).

This is all incorrect. All of the current MacBooks (Pro or non-Pro) are using an 800mHz FSB bus, and a 1.5 Gbps SATA bus for the hard drive (which, given the current speeds of even the fastest 2.5-inch drives, is far more than adequate).

Reference: developer.apple.com

I'd be very surprised if it made even the slightest real-world difference for SSL itself, Video-SL (much more CPU-intensive) I'm not so sure about.




Yes, no brackets. And the effects all work as advertised. From what I recall in checking things on a Mac Mini (with the older GMA950 graphics) there were much fewer of them available on that computer.

Which MB do you own, Mark?

sixxx has a regular macbook OG and all efx work no restrictions

The current (introduced Feb. 26th) black one. I did put a 7200rpm drive in it (I use the stock 250gb 5400rpm drive in a Firewire case as a backup), but I doubt that has any effect on what effects show up in Video-SL.

Euh... I am very much surprised. I thought, the MB's only have a limited EFX repertoire.

Now I know about which way to go for a backup VSL laptop.

(was an answer to "sixxx has a regular macbook OG and all efx work no restrictions")

The intel graphics are actually quite good, trouble is the OpenGL support under windows is poor. I'm pretty sure if you install windows using bootcamp you would find the graphics card was restricted.

Indeed. I same the same h/w originally with windows -> verry restricted efx, with OSX on it, no restriction. Very sad for Windows users.

Okay, I just double checked... (2.2GHz+GMAX1300, which should be your onboard gfx adapter), you are right that there are no efx restrictions. However, and this is very important, as soon as you use certain efx, the fps rate drops dramatically. I added the LED billboard effect to both channels and the fps rate dropped from 60 to 30! Mind you... I had about 30% idle time w/o any effects enabled! This is a serious impact. So whoever wants to use VSL and wants to use it to its full capabilities -> the MB is not a choice, you have to go with the MBP (assuming you want to go the currently-only-safe-route called Mac).

Damned, I was too quick with the post cause forgot something... Mark, can you confirm you have similar results on your current MB?

Good Info

efx are for wussies

ok guys, lol, see this is really good, cuz two days ago i was trying to decide whether i want the xtra 500 dollars on the mac book pro 2.5 or the 2.4.

well if anyone can help me out, let me know what you think.

the macbook pro i have is running at 2.4 ghz, right now, and has 2 gigs of ram which are at 667 or 600mhz, (don't quote me on that) but i went ahead and bought 2 (2 gig sticks of corsair pc-6400) so now after installing the memory it will run at the 800mhz speed with 4 gigs of ram, but i still have the 256 mb video card, =(
am i going to be ok with video sl?
or should i just invest in the 2.5 ghz?

You'll be fine with Video SL. Like I've posted before, I have the 2.4 Penryn with 2gb, and it's running flawlessly. I'm still going to upgrade to 4gb soon, just to be safe, but I am very confident in saying that it works completely fine as a stock model. I also encode my videos using very high settings - 720x480 H.264 29.97fps 4600kbps, and AAC 320kbps audio. No dropped frames, no stuttering, no problems.

those are really high settings, probably a little too high on the video bitrate, but it's all personal preference and whatever works with your system.

I'm stunned..... those are really high settings.

I don't know, I just feel that it is important to keep as much of the DVD quality as possible. Hard drives are so cheap these days anyway!

If only space was the issue...

VOB/MPEG-2 support would solve that.

I would be all over that.

by the way...
VDJ's output with h.264 settings of around 3000kbs looks IDENTICAL to the full VOB files. Serato's output isn't as good.

I fully agree, and I'm sure many others do, but that seems to be a discussion that doesn't go over well on this forum.

But really, mods, I am curious if any of you can give your input on this: Why was the decision made to use the QuickTime engine for VSL? VDJ seems to just use some sort of standard VFW engine (or something similarly generic) since it supports any video format for which you have a codec installed on your machine. And, VOB playback is absolutely perfect. I am just curious as to why VSL wasn't made this way?

VDJ wrote INTERNAL DECODERS for video file formats. Windows also has a plugin registry for video codecs that allow, like you said, VDJ to use whatever decoders are installed on your machine. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't with VDJ.

VSL went with Quicktime. Probably because:

a.) they didn't know how or want to write INTERNAL DECODERS like VDJ has

or

b.) they didn't want to deal with the lack of plugin registry and direct x on mac.

I mean to say, INTERNAL DECODERS rule. They also use less CPU.

I absolutely understand for the Mac reason. I just REALLY wish this could have been done, at least for the Windows side. But, whatever, enough bitching from me! I bought my Mac, I have the setup, now let's mix videos :)

if serato would have done different programming for different platforms, the vsl program as a whole would suffer:
- twice the number of programmers needed to support the 2 os's
- twice the number of beta testers needed (ooh ooh, pick me!)
- twice the amount of time between updates (boo)

that being said, i am a life-long mac user looking to upgrade and can't decide what to get. i wish i could take my ttm57 into bestbuy and install ssl/vsl on all the machines to compare.

i currently have a 2.16 macbook (64mb shared video) with 3gb ram & 320gb hard drive. it has been maxed out. i'm looking to upgrade to a macbook pro but can't decide which one. dj'ing is not my principle source of income, i'm a teacher and will be unemployed for the summer so i really need to justify how much i should put into this *hobby*. apple keeps teasing me with previous macbook pros (128mb video card) for $1249 refurb. i'm just afraid that since 128 is the minimum i will be out of luck when vsl 2.0 comes out.

*bump*

i posted a follow-up to this in another section of the forum, then realized i wouldn't get many "educated" viewers in the off-topic discussion.

any input over @ scratchlive.net would be greatly appreciated.