Using Premiere on XP Pro/Parallels

I purchased a new MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 17 inch to be my primary workhorse for my photography and video. I come from PC - Dell. I have purchased Photoshop CS2 and other software I need for my photography for the Mac, but I have not had the money yet to get Final Cut Pro. My question is could I use Premiere on Parallels and will it work well? I don't understand how the RAM and Hard Drive space is distributed between the two operating systems. Do I need to increase the RAM in my Parallels settings before working on video in Parallels? And what about the HD space? Currently I have my video captured with my PC into my external HD which is formated NTSF, I'm assuming I will need to transfer it to my macbook so that I can edit it, is this correct even though I'm editing on the PC side of the Mac?

Thanks for your help.

It'll work, but the performance may be a bit laggy on certain operations, rendering is one of those things I would expect to run slower.

I'd dedicate a huge chunk of memory to your virtual machine, particularly if you're going to stay inside of Premiere for the duration of your work. Obviously the more memory you give to your XP session, the slower operations inside of MacOS and Mac applications will be, so I'd just give as much memory to your XP VM and not try switching back and forth. Alternately, if you don't get the performance you expect inside of Parallels, use Boot Camp.

As for editing NTFS video on an external drive, just plug it in to your USB port and Parallels will mount it (if you have your options set to automatically connect USB devices). I don't remember if Parallels supports USB 2.0 devices yet however, and that may be your real bottleneck. If it does not, then you'll have to create a fairly beefy partition on your MBP's internal hard drive for use with Premiere, and it has to be NTFS formatted. Raw video is 14g per hour and FAT32 only supports filesizes up to 2g, but then it sounds like you already know that since your external drive is NTFS.

Anyone know if Parallels supports USB 2.0?

Does the memory you dedicate to Parallels free up once you close Parallels or does it always stay dedicated to Parallels waiting to be used?

JRV said:

Does the memory you dedicate to Parallels free up once you close Parallels or does it always stay dedicated to Parallels waiting to be used?

Click to expand...

Once you shut down the virtual machine (you don't even need to quit Parallels), the memory is freed.

Freed up RAM when Closing Parallels

That is surely good to know about having the memory freed up when closing Parallels.

Parallels latest Beta version which is what I have loaded on my machine, does read USB 2.0 and also enables you to use the DVD drive as a DVD burner as opposed to previous versions of Parallels. So, I figured I can actually render and burn to DVD when done with my project.

So, are you saying I can write to NTFS when hooked up to Parallels? I know I can only read NTFS hardrives on the OS X side.

Thanks.

Andry