Thinking of getting a 15" MBP for FCPX... few questions...

My two immediate thoughts, I am sure there will be more.

1. Go with the highest spec machine you are able to afford, or you will spend your render times wishing for more speed.

2. Store all of your vision on en external USB3 or Thunderbolt hard drive, the 5400speed drive is not fast enough for video work.

Tony

I recently ditched my Mac Pro and went to an MBPro.

Shopped around for a late 2011 17" as the deals are good if there are any left.

They have been discontinued.

You get larger screen, thunderbolt port and expresscard34 for additional add ons if required.

Mine is great except for heat during exports and transcoding so think about some type of cooling gadget.

Al

As Tony writes, try to get the faster machine if you can afford. fcpx needs: a fast hard drive, a fast processor and lots of memory (ram).

Just a bit of my own experience: I am presently working with fcpx 1005 on a retina macbook pro (15", 2.7GHz, 16GB ram, the faster video card, and 500GB SSD internal drive). I was waiting for a mac pro so I settled for this machine and it lives up to all my expectations. I am editing material in ProRes 1080p30 with a lot of processing (effects) and usually 4-5 layers. The machine performs better than I would have imagined.

- Internal hard drive: of course the internal SSD hard drive helps but you can skip that if money is tight. Try and put a 7200 rpm drive, the price difference should not be so great and there still will be a difference.

- RAM is vital: on a regular project, as soon as you use color correction and plugins fcpx eats all the ram it can get. I used to work on a 6GB ram macbook pro until last summer and needed to quit and relaunch fcpx constantly. Now I have 16GB in the new macbook pro and the memory-hungry situation is just slightly better. The performance of course is much better in the sense that fcpx tends less to forget things, to show the beach ball or to act erratically. All this is due to lack of RAM. So do not spare on that and put in the maximum your machine can take.

- The speed of the processor will make a difference between smooth and less smooth performance, and render times of course.

- fcpx, also, is now GPU optimized and a faster video card in the macbook pro will make a definite difference. Same as for CPU.

- external hard drives: don't even think of editing on your internal drive. Think that all your system and apps are installed there, so you want to keep this drive from running hot and die prematurely.

Use USB3 or eSATA drive enclosures. With an adaptor expresscard (like sonnet) you will get a decent performance and be able to read several ProRes 422 layers and a lot of ProRes Proxy layers and not despair in front of a sluggish machine. (I just upgraded from eSATA to TBolt RAID. This also helps with hi-res material and when you load an event with a lot of video files - much faster display). But both usb3 and eSATA are quite fine. If you can try and use a dual-drive enclosure you will get a real measurable performance boost.

- Screen: the retina is showing the images with a LOT better definition than the regular monitor. It is not too relfective. In studio, with a normal lighting arrangement it is fine. My other machines were all non-reflective and of course that's perfect. Stil the retina without question is better.

What else… well good luck.

If you had the same specs with retina, would the CPU/RAM be struggling to keep up due to the extra resolution?

It is true that according to reviews, the Retina takes some GPU power to manage more pixels.

On the other hand, the machine is fast enough to handle it nicely. I use the mbp retina 2.7GHz with 16GB ram and the optional faster video card. As a second monitor I have a 23" cinema display. The main window (timeline, etc.) is on the Cinema display (larger work area) and the full screen monitor on the retina mbp. The results are very good. There is a very obvious difference in image quality, and the retina, even before slight calibration, show an image crisper, much closer to that of the camera.

What you gain in image resolution is really worth it since it gets you much closer to having a broadcast monitor on your desktop.

The only time I see the CPU-GPU struggle is of course when you process your clips with plugins, but that's normal.