-
IMac Enough?
Hi, I’m basically wondering whether an IMac (2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) would have enough grunt to edit a project I’m about to edit (in FCP).
I don’t own a system yet, so I don’t want to buy one and find out it can’t handle it. Yes, of course I’d love to get a Mac Pro, but I just don’t have the cash. If I need one for the job, I’ll just have to hire an edit suite.
The project is a 50 minute concert shot with 4 cameras in ‘DV50’. All the material was recorded straight from the cameras to a hard drive.
I’d love to be able to lay the cams up and switch between them.
I’ve looked at all the previous posts I could on editing with proxies, but it still seems a bit unclear to me, especially because a lot of them talk about ‘capturing’ at a low res and then up-rezing with the cam tapes later – which I obviously don’t have.
In my situation, can I compress the existing big files, edit on the smaller ones, then reconfigure at the end? From what I can tell, you need enough grunt to be able to watch the program in hi res at the end, so that might be my downfall. I guess I can always take it to an edit suite for that stage at the end.
And drives are key too, right? Seems like systems can’t handle bigger files coz the drives can’t run fast enough, rather than the computer processor being too slow. So can I get a raided firewire 800 drive to help?
Will i be pushing the friendship with my new IMac? I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot.
Thanx in advance,
Rob. -
4 Replies
-
Hi Rob,
I own an Imac at 3.06Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and the 512MBNvidia card (bought last may)
and recently i edited a live show show shot with 3cams. Footage used was DV format and i used the multicam feature on FCP using the internal HD. I had no problems at all. I didnt use any fancy effects apart from a couple of Motion made things (i used the Motion project file within FCP – didnt export video from Motion) where there were 3 video clips playing at the same time plus 3 (i think) object generators (sorry if i dont use the right terms) on top of those..with 1-or 2 effects..All played back fine.The whole project was over 2hours long and i never came across any problems due to CPU overload..
It took about 5hours (not sure) to export to MPG2 using compressor (One pass at 7Mbps)
When editing i had no problems on playback while moving fast back and forth through footage..And the 24″ screen is really nice! The machine is silent and neat. I now have an external FW800 drive..So far so good!
Hope that helps…
Anastasis -
Forgot to say there was some footage from a 4th cam which i also used.
So at times i had 4 DV video streams running plus the video on my editing timeline (5 video streams in total). Playback was fine even when scrubbing fast.. -
THanks Anastasis, really helpful. I also asked a friend of mine who reckons it will be fine…so I’m hopeful. If anyone disagrees, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts.
-
I have edited on my wife’s imac without any problem from an external pre-captured drive.
I would not recommend editing from media on the OS boot drive
The problem with the imac comes when you want to use other codecs other than dv.
There is only one FW800 bus, (shared with the FW400) so you cannot connect another device (AJA, MOTU, Matrox capture) onto a separate FW800 bus as with a mac pro or mac book pro (using the express34 slot). Any external monitor monitoring has also to be via FW through a camera etc.
I have an Esata raid5 or FW800 raid0 (depending on which drive i’m using.) connected via my macbook pro’s express34 card(s), and my motu V4HD on the internal FW bus.
This can give editing with uncompressed 10 bit SD via SDI.I have also run 9 DVcam recordings on an OB in multi cam with the raid0 (g-raid2) setup.
Steve
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up