Buying iMac 21.5″–Specs for FCP X?

[Rick Lang]

Jenn, if you can manage the budget, get the i7 processor rather than the i5. The i7 supports multi threading which means you have the ability to run 8 threads at once. The i5 is not multi-threaded so you only run 4 threads. At times, such as when you render output, the i7 will be using all the threads you have.

Good luck!

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Robin S. kurz]

[Rick Lang] “At times, such as when you render output”

Then again FCP X uses the GPU predominantly (if not exclusively) for output, so even then it wouldn’t make much, if any, difference. Even a version of RED that doesn’t use the CPU but rather the GPU for encoding/decoding is coming out. Finally.

[Craig Alan]

Leave room in your budget for an external raid. Look at owc for these as well as ram. You can go thunderbolt or USB 3. Thunderbolt is great if you will be daisy chaining addition drives or other add-Ons in the future. Which I think you will since cheaper high end codec cams keep coming out. Thus massive amounts of media.

You most likely do not need that big a system drive. Although you don’t need a SSD at all it does speed up loading apps which when you use it feels very nice. FC does seem to load fast anyway but there is this delay in a regular drive when you double click to load.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Jenn Lindsay]

Dear Robin,

Can you please tell me what RED is?

Thank you!
Jenn

[Jenn Lindsay]

Dear Craig,

Thank you for your input!

Can you please tell me what an “external raid” is?

The camera I am working with now is a Canon HF-10 and the file type is AVCHD. I have about thirty hours of footage to work with for my current project. Is that a codec cam?

Please forgive my ignorance. I am a totally pragmatic user and work alone and don’t always know all the names for what I am using and only learn it when I need to or encounter it.

Thank you!
Jenn

[Robin S. kurz]

RED = https://www.red.com (camera company with their own proprietary and still extremely *CPU* intensive codec)

RAID = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

😉

[Jenn Lindsay]

Dear Robin,

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=thank+you+very+much+for+all+your+help

😉

[Craig Alan]

Sure.

read this:

https://www.larryjordan.biz/fcpx-when-to-optimize-media/

The system drive is the drive that is installed in your computer. The media drive is either an internal drive in a computer that can house more than one drive like a tower computer or an external drive that is attached to the computer with an interconnect such as usb, firewire, thunderbolt. A raid is seen as a single drive but is actually two or more drives that have been raided together. This marriage can be done either through software (apple disk utility can do it) or hardware where they are housed in a unit. Raids can edit faster and handle more streams of video than a single drive of the same capacity. If you are buying a new Mac they come with usb 3 and thunderbolt. The advantage to thunderbolt is they can be daisy chained so that each device is connected to each other and connected to the Mac with one input. Thus a chain.

So lets say you buy a 4 TB raid and it gets full but you are still working on projects on it or need access to the media on it. You can then buy a new one and connect it to that one. Viola, you now have 8TB. Keep in mind that raids like single drives should not be more than 75% or 80% full. On the low end this is a solid choice:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/METB7DH4%2E0T/

and here’s an overwhelming list of them: https://eshop.macsales.com/Search/?Ntk=Primary&Ns=P_Popularity%7c1&Ne=8050&N=4294967255&N2=4294967255&Ntt=thunderbolt

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.