Mac users who edit video : A question
 

I use dual iMac 27" for most of my normal work (photoshop, html, accounting, project management, skype, demos, site and live stream management, etc, but lately I am finding myself editing more and more video for our members area.

The iMacs that I have are fast for everything but seem to slow way down when working with video files (30 minute mpeg's at 720 lines take forever to load and convert to other formats, and editing is painful). I have 8GB of Ram.

I am considering buying a 12 Core Mac Pro with 24GB of Ram, but its a real budget breaker. Is there anyone here with a system like this? Is it fast / smooth? Does it make work easier? For the price it should be *extremely fast* of course but I'd like to hear from anyone on it before diving in.

Do NOT buy a mac pro yet. They haven't been upgraded properly for years and they've promised a new one this year.

but yes, my brother has one, it renders stuff in minutes, rather than hours.

problem with the iMac is that it uses laptop components. So you're essentially trying to render on a laptop.

I'm assuming all the video files are on your internal drive and the bottleneck isn't a slow USB external drive?

Dual Core 27" ?

You'd do much better with the quad core.

I'd second Damian on holding off with buying a Mac Pro. They will be updated pretty soon.

The current iMac models are pretty fast. I am cutting FullHD on a 2011 i7 iMac with 8GB, and it is blazing fast.

What software are you using for editing?

During cut it is important you make use of proxy media!

Also SSDs help a lot, but you need at least Firewire800 connection to make any use of those on your iMac.

I think "12 Core Mac Pro with 24GB of Ram" is a nice machine, but overkill for editing. It is a different story when it comes to rendering, but if you don't need to do this a lot, you can let the Mac do that work overnight or (if you use FinalCut Pro X) distribute that rendering load to the Macs in your network.

My 2cents,

Oliver

I concur - i only use imovie for playing with gopro3 movies but they are full HD and many GB in size and it converts them fast on iMac 27" 2009 i7 with 12GB RAM

Ok cool thanks for the tip. I didn't know that. There is a new one available now, but it looks like its just the same hardware but with more cores. Everything else is, I think, just the same.

Correct. All files are local to the machine.


Thats right - Dual Core i7.




Ok thanks !!


Wow something is wrong then. My machine is creeping along and nothing that can be called fast. I am suspecting it might be my OS. I recently backed up my older machine to my newer machine and maybe I wrecked something. Dammit.

Final Cut Pro, but even iMovie is dragging.


I have been considering SSD for a while but I would like it setup as my boot drive if possible. Are you setup this way? Or do you use SSD in another way?

My external drive is Firewire800 already. (I was using the Apple Time Capsule drives over Ethernet originally. Firewire800 is a big improvement).

That would be the ultimate setup but way way overkill for this. Thanks though! :)

Yeah, you are using proxy media in final cut?

that's just typical mac bullshit... seriously.. mac's are allergic to everything and so you must convert everything to 'mac' so the os can deal with it... that's what is talking time, videos just blow right on through for the PC

iMac is not a machine made for editing video.