13 or 15 inch Retina for travel, video editing and home?

For travel? How should we know? Only you can know this.

Are you a giant basketball player, or are you as small as a mouse?

If you are a giant basketball player, then I think that the 15" would be perfect for you.

If you have the money, buy the best. If you don't, be cheap.

Perfect! Then buy the average MacBook Pro...

I'm gonna say the 15". Normally the 13 is a far better machine for pure travel (with the MacBook Air being the best), but since you say you are a frequent Final Cut Pro X user with the laptop mostly used at home, the 15" gives you more screen to spread out the FCP interface, plus it has a real graphics card that FCP can take advantage of.

Also, 256GB seems like not enough storage unless you are keeping your HD video footage and FCP temporary files on external hard drives. Or work on really short pieces.

The Motion question, and probably the Final Cut one, might be answered more definitively in the Motion and Final Cut forums instead of this one, since you should get an opinion from people who use those apps daily.

Here's an opinion of the 13" Retina although this guy does photo, not video, editing:

http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20121023_1-MacBookPro-Retina-13.html

I see your point - you'd better get both the 13" and the 15". Then you have all your bases covered.

Randomer wrote:

My concern is that while an intel 4000 grapgics card is better than the intel 3000 in a Macbook Air (that I'm coming from) that performance increase will be cancelled out by the fact the Retina 13 is a higher resolution. Would anyone agree with that?

That might only be answerable by looking for a review with benchmarks comparing to other Macs, not by speculating, since we can't simulate the various variables in our heads precisely enough to make a good guess.

In the absence of that, I suggested the 15" in part because it sounded like the real difference in FCP/Motion work might be having dedicated graphics versus either the 3000 or 4000. And also on the evaluation in the article I linked earlier, which looked at the whole picture of the 13"...half the RAM ceiling, half the cores, integrated graphics...

Here's another article that might help. Check the Final Cut and Motion benchmarks...the underpowered specs of the 13" really hurt it. Overall, the 15" blows way past the 13".

SHOOTOUT: 13" Retina MacBook Pro versus 15" Retina MacBook Pro