I agree with Travis - the Soundtrack Pro 101 tutorial is really excellent! I hope to see more Soundtrack Pro tuts too.

So..here I am. After years of editing on the PC I have taken the plunge and decided to get myself a MBP 2.4GHz 17" all singing-all dancing-notebook along with FCS 2. However, I won't of course get the same kind of performance from it as I would the desktops and so I am looking to enhance that wherever I can. One of the things I'd like to do is add an external drive which I would use for render and captures. Here's my question though... How do I go about adding an external HDD? Sounds easy but I am trying to understand whether that would mean I'd only be able to to have the HDD connected to my FW800 port and nothing else at the same time? After all I need to connect my camera as well as my drive when capturing video. Would I perhaps be better off just using the drive for my renders, therefore capturing without it attached from my camera, unplugging the camera and then connecting the HDD for when I am working with my footage? Or can the captured footage be moved to the external HDD manually (this isn't easily achievable in Avid Liquid for example which I've been using up to now). Finally - any recommendations on which drives are worth considering (personal experiences welcome). Apologies for all the questions but I know zip about Macbooks, or Macs in general for that matter.

Thanks Martin. I read somewhere (at least I think I did) that the two ports were in some way shared on the MBP and that you could only utilise one or the other at the same time? Maybe I've got my wires crossed on that one.

Opted for an external Freecom 500GB HDD over eSATA (just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else in the future is looking to do the same)

Last evening I followed the first exercise in the Apple Pro Training - DVD Studio Pro 4 book. All went as planned other than the resulting quality was not really that great. It was very blocky and jagged in comparison with other SD video i have viewed on my TV (Samsung LE40M87BDX). Is the MPEG 2 encoder used by DVD Studio Pro very good? Am I better off encoding outside of DVD Studio Pro 4? The only thing I did different to the book's lesson was to encode for PAL (given that I am viewing it on a PAL DVD player).

So my first ever Mac lands on my desk on Monday (MacBook Pro) and I'm wondering now if I'll have to fork out even more money for the OS upgrade within a month of owning my MBP (I know it won't be mandatory but I'd rather have the latest os if I've gone to the trouble of purchasing the latest h/w). What is Apple usually like when moving between interim OS releases (10.x.x to 10.y.y)? Do they usually charge for that upgrade and if so what are the typical costs?

This is a question really to macProVideo themselves, but what screen capturing software are you using to create your tutorials? On the PC I used Camtasia and I'm looking for its equivalent on the Mac. Anyone able to help?

Excellent! Thank you!!

I too have been waiting for Motion 3 tutorial.