How much CPU / GPU to effortlessly edit native AVCHD?

[Jacob Kerns]

The i7 is fast enough but the only option is Ati/intel cards which might limit you in the future. You would be better going with a mac pro or Win7 box.

NIADA
Technical Director

[Walter Soyka]

[Jacob Kerns] “The i7 is fast enough but the only option is Ati/intel cards which might limit you in the future. You would be better going with a mac pro or Win7 box.”

NVIDIA’s Mac drivers seem pretty poor. ATI outperforms them quite handily, especially with OpenCL performance (which would be key to FCPX performance). If Kristian were interested in Premiere Pro, though, then a supported CUDA-enabled NVIDIA card in a Mac Pro would be the way to go.

Kristian, the CPU and SSD would affect performance in different ways. The SSD will make general things like booting and loading applications significantly faster, and will also improve memory swapping performance (for example, when you are running many apps at the same time and running low on system RAM). The i7 would provide a bigger boost for specific processor-intensive tasks, like decoding AVCHD and rendering video effects.

If you can afford both, I think they’re both worthwhile.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jeremy Garchow]

Just to be clear, you can’t edit natively, it will be rewrapped QT files.

Jeremy

[Kevin Patrick]

Here some FCP X testing on some of the latest Macs.

https://barefeats.com/fcpx01.html

Also, note that there is a white paper link on FCP X towards the bottom that talks about how FCP X uses and can benefit from various HW configurations.

The SSD drive will improve things like; boot time, wake from sleep, launch and install applications, running things like repair permissions. I doubt you will see much gain when it comes to running applications like FCP X. Plus, the speed of the Apple SSD drive is not as fast as SSD drives you can get from places like OWC.

But you will get more for your money on an i7 upgrade over an i5, as opposed to getting an SSD drive. Plus, when you upgrade to an i7 you can upgrade the graphics as well. Including going to 1 GB or even 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Note that the i7 iMac in the Barefeats test has the 6970 GPU and 2 GB of memory. It’s keeping pace with what is probably the fastest Mac Pro you can get today. (until you buy and Mac Pro, then Apple will finally release a new Mac Pro, maybe, hopefully, then again …)

[Rafael Amador]

Is interesting what they say about long clips.
people has reported the same here:

“However, when we opened a second project with similar assets, the real memory use by FCPX doubled. That implies that importing HD video clips of longer duration than our 30 second sample would impact real memory as well”.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Kristian Tigersjäl]

Part of FCPX’s new features are “native editing of AVCHD” so that should definetely be possible. It may not be perfect for everything but for simple editing ti should most likely work fine.

[Kristian Tigersjäl]

Thanks this should prove helpful. The thing here is that video editing isn’t the sole purporse of this computer, it’s also going to be used for general acticities aswell as programming so there are alot of needs that need to be met and this is where I am doubtful on what to get. I just found a firm in Sweden that installs SSD’s from 3rd party so this may be an option aswell,

[Kevin Patrick]

Be careful about installing non-Apple SSD’s in an iMac. I’m not an iMac user, but I believe they have non-standard HDD’s in their iMacs that have some firmware on them such that an off the shelf HDD will cause issues. I’m not sure if that’s the case for SSDs or not in iMacs. Plus, I thought SSD in an iMac was a memory card, not a 2.5″ SSD drive.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Kristian Tigersjäl] “Part of FCPX’s new features are “native editing of AVCHD” so that should definetely be possible. It may not be perfect for everything but for simple editing ti should most likely work fine.
“

Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch. It rewraps to a QT movie, it doesn’t edit off of the native files. It does take less time than a ProRes transcode.

Are you planning on getting an external drive to store your media?

I would opt for the faster processor, with as much RAM and GPU as you can afford. Ram will be crucial in 64bit.

[Kristian Tigersjäl]

The 3,5 drives in mid-2011 models now feature a special cable taht makes none-apple drives unsuitable, they work but make the machine noisy… Have no idea how that works with ssd as they are 2,5 and probably aren’t as hot if hot at all.