MacBook Air continues to impress

By Walter Biscardi

During NAB 2014 I told you I purchased a base MacBook Air to replace my aging MacBook Pro and went with the absolute base model machine as you can see. And it only has 256GB Solid State hard drive internal so I put most of my files, including my iPhoto library on an external USB 3 drive.

The main use of this machine is email and writing (like this). Even the salesman at the Apple Store told me that if I needed to do any “heavy lifting” such as video editing or Photoshop, this machine would choke. At NAB 2014 I was impressed I was able to edit something like 20 “WallyCam” videos off the Air and a single USB 3 hard drive. This thing just continues to impress me as I’m able to continue working on a much, MUCH larger project in the evenings at home.

Because the screen is only 13? I used it to run a full screen timeline.

I connected a 24? Dell UltraSharp monitor as the secondary display to hold the Source / Program / Bins and my now favorite “Markers” Window.

All the media lives on, plays off a single 1TB USB3 Seagate Drive I picked up for about $75 at Costco. This particular project was shot over 5 days. Each day had up to three cameras shooting. 5 different camera types were used. Canon, Sony, Panasonic and GoPro all represented in the footage. It’s all 1080p / 23.98 and it’s around 650GB of total material. read more...