I'm about to buy a 2nd edit system (currently running dual G5, AJA IO, with FCP 5 and, 3TB of SATA uncompressed storage) I need this next system to be mobile but still do uncompressed video. I see that you can use the AJA IO with the old MacBooks but you need a PCMCIA FW card with dual FW800 drives raided together to do 10bit uncompressed off of Digi Beta or Beta SP. Is there a pcmcia card slot on the new intel macbooks? Is anyone running this setup with success? I need to buy this thing ASAP and have it running soon. Any ideas?
I wouldn't say you need a 2 drive RAID to handle Uncompressed 10bit standard def. You may have heard this about HD Uncompressed, but it is certainly not true with SD uncompressed. If you plan on uncompressed multistreaming (RT dissolves, RT overlays) then you will need such a system, but it is not necessary for single stream editing. Most FW800 devices can achieve a solid 50MB/sec. This is well over the ~25MB/sec that uncompressed 10bit requires for playback.
If you need dual stream for RT effects, you could go with a FW800 RAIDed harddrive such as Lacie D2 big disk, which has 2 drives sharing a single FW800 bus and can easily achieve 60MB/sec sustained. This is borderline, but should be adequate in most situations. Remember not to attach any FW400 devices to the same bus as the FW800, or you will lose the advantages of FW800. Remember also that all Apple computers except xServe use the same bus for FW400 and FW800 ports, so you should get an ExpressCard if you plan on using FW800 and other devices at the same time.
I believe there are some SATA ExpressCard solutions out there now, and I would strongly recommend these over FireWire800. A single Western Digital Caviar RE2 drive will achieve 65MB/sec sustained speeds on a SATA bus. FW800 devices are a bit slower than native SATA since the data needs to be adjusted through a bridge chip.
Another workflow solution is to work in offline resolution with the macbook. PhotoJPEG at Medium Quality setting is great for the MacBook's internal hard drive and can be used in 720x486 unlike the DV CODEC's that are 720x480. For this reason PhotoJPEG can be swapped with Uncompressed footage easily without the odd issues that other offline formats can cause. Kona likes PhotoJPEG as well.
You might also wish to upgrade your MacBook Pro Hard drive to 160MB 7200. It should achieve speeds in the 50MB/sec range, which is nearly 2x the speed of the standard 4500RPM drive. That might be enough for 2x stream editing, but it would likely drop frames occasionally when dual streaming. Just be sure to render your sequences before outputing to tape to avoid dual streaming.
One last thing: if you're capturing footage from BetaSP, I seriously doubt you'd see a difference between the great DVCPro50 CODEC and uncompressed 10bit. The tape format doesn't really have enough latitude give you more detail than 8bits in my opinion. Digibeta is better in 10bit, but only with extremely clean footage such as film transfer. Most CCD noise or film grain create enough randomness in source footage that banding usually isn't an issue.
