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Mac Pro or iMac for Editing
I’m facing a necessary upgrade to my home system at the moment, and I’m looking for opinions on what the best value would be as far as which machine I invest in. Obviously, a Mac Pro would be fantastic, but I’m wondering if it’s truly necessary for me. My work consists of mostly editing on Final Cut, Premiere, or Avid. I do some basic AE work but nothing incredibly intense as my focus is primarily on editing video.
Simply put, I don’t want to spend an extra thousand or two on processing power that I won’t ultimately use that much. What are the true advantages of the Mac Pro over an iMac, and what kind of work would make it a necessary investment? All feedback is welcome.
Thanks.
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1 Reply
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[Dan McGuire] “Simply put, I don’t want to spend an extra thousand or two on processing power that I won’t ultimately use that much.”
I agree… So what did you finally get? (assuming our purchased something by now)
[Dan McGuire] “What are the true advantages of the Mac Pro over an iMac, and what kind of work would make it a necessary investment?”
It sounds like the iMac 5K would be perfect for you. The advantage of the Mac Pro is multiprocessing which is largely used during rendering, and in the case of the new Mac Pro with dual GPUs it has greater GPU capability than a single GPU iMac. If you do a lot of Motion Graphics or compositing I’d get the Mac Pro. If you are mostly editing video I’d go with the new iMac.
I just went through this decision myself and I purchased a 2010 Mac Pro 2.93Ghz 12-Core, 24GB memory, AMD Radeon HD 5870, 1TB Boot + Apple RAID Card w/6TB RAID 5, for $2,275 on eBay. This was $1000 cheaper than a fully loaded iMac 5K and many thousands cheaper than the new Mac Pro’s (which I can’t afford).
BTW, you probably should have posted in the Final Cut Pro forum instead of the OS X forum and you would have gotten replies.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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