best computer for FCPX

[Jeff Greenberg]

MacRumors buyer’s guide says wait. IF you want ot spend the money, buy the faster iMac (because I think it can hold more ram than a MBP) and as much RAM as you can afford.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer | Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC | Adobe Cert. Instructor
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You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New- my book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Compressor Essentials from Lynda.com
(older but still good) Marquee, Media Composer (3.5) and Basic/Advanced Color DVDs (1.0) from Vasst.com
Contact me through my Website

[Matthew Schickler]

I’ve got a 2011 iMac with quad-core i7 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and the 2 GB video card. It also has a thunderbolt port for higher speed external disk access (which I don’t use, Firewire800 works fine for me). For editing, I can’t imagine it running any faster. I can edit 1080p with multiple color corrections, effects, real time scopes, etc. with no perceptible need to render. Of course the transitions and effects do need rendering (which happens automatically in the background as soon as you stop foreground actions) but the un-rendered stuff plays smoothly and it isn’t possible, at least for me, to tell the difference in quality.

[Matthew Celia]

I’ll echo Matthew. I just picked up the 27″ iMac and it’s the best Mac I’ve ever owned. Easily much faster than my 8-core and 12-core mac pros at work (at least for editing). I think a large part has to do with the system drive being SSD. The machine SCREAMS.

With Thunderbolt on the iMac (allowing me to connect high speed RAID’s and capture cards), I personally don’t see much need for the Mac Pro (at least in its current outdated state).

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FCP Guru
http://www.fcpguru.com