Final Cut Pro And Battery Life

Battery life for the Macbook Pro isn't great to begin with, and doing CPU and disk intensive tasks like running FCP with an external hard drive plugged in is unlikely to help this situation much. I wouldn't think you'd get more than about 2 hours with this configuration.

Maybe, but it's hard to predict as it depends on exactly how the system is being used at any one time (FCP may vary in how much it runs that drive, for instance, depending on what's being done) and how much RAM you have in the system (more RAM may mean less paging to the hard drive and hence longer battery life). I'd suggest you ask in the FCP forum and see if anyone has one of the new MBPs that could give you real-life information.

The other thing to remember is that over time the capacities of batteries decrease, so while you may get 1:30 initially, over time it will decrease to 1:20, 1:10, etc.

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