If you want HD and can stick to GPU processing then pro-ress is great, not too much decompression and not too big file sizes (h264 can be good too especially if you just play a file). If you are working on the CPU then less compression is better so your photo jpeg codec is still good (pro-ress does perform well here too). Each version of the mac OS has advantages and disadvantages for playback and decoding (although in my experience go for 10.6.8 or 1.8.4+, 10.7 of any release seems to have the worst performance).

On your main work machine, whatever your resolution, change to an SSD if you can, the performance difference is pretty huge.

There is no easy answer for all machines and all jobs, but if you know the rules and don't expect and patch that works on your quad core mac pro to work on your 2007 laptop you will be fine.

Cheers,

Alex

Thanks so much for your thoughts and for the information.  It is somewhat reassuring that there is no straight answer - at least my confusion and questioning seems justified.

Thanks,

Lauren

First, you're right that the 320 x 240 references are now antiquated. I need to go through this in the manual. But the "Optimizing for Speed" page (starting on page 64 of the current manual, as found in 1.3.0f24 in the Help menu) was updated recently, and that's the advice you should follow.

Internal hard drive with a Mac Book Pro is not as good even as an external FW 800, because the rotation speed of the internal drive is slow (5400RPM) unless you've special ordered or installed a faster one. A few laptop users I know have replaced the optical (DVD) drive with an SSD. That gives them big storage on the main drive, and super fast storage on the SSD. Increasing your hard drive speed is a critical factor in good performance -- especially when playing "heavy" codecs such as Apple Pro Res which has a bandwidth of 20 megabytes per second.

In terms of other HD codecs, I'm afraid I haven't done enough testing myself to give a good recommendation. Others here may have more experience. But, in general I've been testing with Apple Pro Res because the quality is very good and the CPU requirements are not very high. Using H264 will give you much smaller files, and thus lower the hard drive band width requirements, but it eats CPU. 

This topic is always a bit voodoo.... there are pluses and minuses everywhere. Part of it just requires experimentation, and the results on one machine may vary substantially when compared with another.

Sorry that I cannot provide you with clearer gudance. But I hope that what I've said above helps.

I am mostly on a Mac tower - 2.8ghz quad-cord intel xeon - with 16gb of RAM - I am stil on 10.6.8\.  But I am also at times working on laptops (of varying quality and power) - from a 2007 MacBook Pro to a new one with a 2.5ghz intel core i5 running OS 10.8.

I try to run from an internal harddrive when possible -but sometimes am using externals with FW800.

Does this info help?

Thanks.

Codecs and resolutions are depending quite a lot on your machine.

Can you describe it ( OS, CPU, HDDs ) a bit ?

The 320x240 is I think related to the powerbook g4 times, with a recent machine you can deal with HD ( 1080p ), even multiple files at once depending on your storage speed.

Best

Mehdi