Hello. I'm waiting for my MBP to arrive and considering my options for field storage and scratch disc. At home I have a separate internal drive for this, but I'm new to taking my editing away from home.

What do people use and general work flow? Do you ever capture directly to the internal drive?

What portable drive do you use? Key word is portable! I know there are inexpensive terabyte drives out there but I don't want to hump one of those around for a 1/2 shoot.

Which files do you move from the laptop to your desk top when you want to continue work at home (ex: the project file is a pointer to the actual film, how do you move the film data?)?

Thanks in advance,
Bob

Separate internal drive? Do you mean an external FireWire drive?

You can capture to the internal drive as long as you are working in DV or HDV. Other, less compressed, codecs could be tricky if not impossible and I haven't tried ProRes yet. Of course the 250GB internal drive is limited to about 15 to 17 hours of video files. You can add an external drive and capture to that as well but a fast enough drive would probably need an external AC power supply. There are portable FireWire drives that are powered by the FireWire bus but these tend to be slow for video capture and they drain the laptop's battery.

Use Media Manager in Final Cut Pro to transfer the project to another drive or computer.

I have four My Book hard drives from Western Digital ranging from 300GB to 800GB they are small enough to fit in a large computer case I carry my MBP in, it allows me to dump the files on location without worry about memory issues on my laptop.

well, first of all i changed the 200Gb internal drive of my macbook pro to a 500Gb. Thats enough room for me to dump files in the field (i´m using an Ex1). of course some external hard drives also do the job.