I'm looking for advice on setting up a humble 13" MacBook that is a 2.0GHz Duo core with 512 MB ram and 80 GB internal hard drive. The first project has about 2 hours of raw footage SD MiniDV to be edited on FCE HD 3.5 (already installed). What should I do about external drive and RAM? I was leaning toward 1 Gig RAM (maybe 512 would be OK?) and a LaCie 120 GB FW400 bus powered drive.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thank you.

get 2 gigs of RAM if you can swing it - 512 is really not suitable, and 1 gig will run out fast if you ever run more than one major app at a time, i.e. FCP and photoshop.