iMac OK for FCP Studio 2?

[Shane Ross]

#1…more RAM. 512MB won’t cut it. 2GB minimum. 4GB better.

FCP will run, but Motion will be slow. This is a consumer computer you are buying, and a professional application, so bear that in mind. It will run, but not as well as it would on a MacPro or Mac Book Pro.

Shane

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[Russell Lasson]

[Shane Ross] “#1…more RAM. 512MB won’t cut it. 2GB minimum. 4GB better. “

I think he was talking about 512MB RAM on the graphics card. The 3.06Ghz iMac comes with a standard of 2GB internal RAM.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT

[Jeff Carpenter]

What kind of footage and what kind of work?

It will work fine (with a firewire 800 media drive) for most things, but you don’t have many options for monitoring the video on an external monitor.

So, short answer, the iMac is fine. But you’re talking about spending almost $3,000 for something that’s “fine.”

Rather than that, I’d spend $4,000 on something that’s “super-fine.” For the budjet-minded I’d suggest doing this:

* Refurbished Mac Pro with One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
$1,999

* 2 GB additional RAM at crucial.com
$200

* 1 one-TB SATA for personal files
$210 on newegg.com right now

* 2 one-TB SATA drives to make internal Media RAID with
$420 on newegg.com right now

* 1 Western Digital MyBook USB hard drive for Time-Machine backup (not baking-up Media Drive RAID, just personal files and boot drive)
$230

* Dell E248WFP 24″ monitor
$380

* Blackmagic Intensity Pro for video monitoring
$350

* Any kind of external video monitor
SD or HD – Based on needs

So without the video monitor you’re currently at $3,789. Yes, more than the iMac, but you’ll be getting a heck of a lot more for that money.

And I listed a BUNCH of stuff. To save money you could scale down on the hard drives (I gave you 3.3 TB in total space, plust another 1 TB for backups) or the RAM (2 GB isn’t as good as 4 GB, but it’ll do) or even the Blackmagic card (I’d suggest it eventually, but you could do that later).

The point is, you can get a pretty spectacular system for not much more than a top-of-the-line iMac.

[Rick Wise]

Ooops, I left out the RAM: 4 GB 800MHZ DDR2 SDRAM – 2 x 2 GB.

Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
http://www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com

[Russell Lasson]

The iMac is a good machine, but is limited in expandability. There are very few solutions if you need to capture from something other than firewire.

I think the iMac is a great offline edit system, but I wouldn’t consider it for a finishing station.

I personally would rather go for the $2299 Mac Pro with 4-cores or the refurbished 8-core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro for $2499. That way, on the low end, you can add a Intensity Pro for $349 as an IO and then upgrade to whatever you need later. Also, you can just add more hard drives internally as you need more room instead of dealing firewire.

But again, for some people, the iMac is a perfect solution.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT

[Mark Maness]

Well…

That’s a loaded question. What type of video do you intended to do with this iMac? Do you use lots of graphics?

I would expect that Motion wouldn’t run very well, if at all. And your memory… Let’s just say, I would try anything with less than 2 gig. You won’t get very far under 2 gig.

Let see… what else… Oh yeah…

You’ll need some sort of media drive. The internal drive will not work for editing video. You can use a good quality fw800 drive but you can do ProRes422 with that and you can forget Uncompressed.

Personally speaking, if this is your business… Choke it up and get a proper Mac Pro system with no less than 4 gig of RAM. I will say that Apple memory is the most expensive, but you can replace it with memory from Crucial or Kenningston for less money.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Rick Wise]

Wow! Thanks for all the quick responses. I think I get it: forget the iMac. Think refurbished Mac Pro plus non-apple vendors for the extra needed parts.

I am not at all clear about the “media drive.” Am I correct that I do NOT need to add one to a Mac Pro to run FCP?

Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
http://www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com

[Shane Ross]

[Rick Wise] “I am not at all clear about the “media drive.””

A separate hard drive in which to store all your captured footage. You should never capture to the internal drive. It is too busy with the OS. Yes, it works for some people, and can work some of the time, but it might drop frames as the OS goes about it’s business. Best to get a separate drive for your media.

[Rick Wise] “Am I correct that I do NOT need to add one to a Mac Pro to run FCP?”

To RUN FCP? No. But it is a VERY economical way to get media drives. The MacPro has 4 internal drive bays, three of them empty. Slap in 500GB to 1TB drives, and you can have, internally, 1.5 to 3 TB of drive storage. And bare drives are much cheaper than external drives…because you don’t have to pay for all that other electronics.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
http://www.LFHD.net
Read my blog!

[Jeff Carpenter]

And to elaborate, if you put 2 SATA drives in the Mac Pro and RAID them using the disc Utility, you’ll get a super-fast connection to those drives since it has double the bandwidth of a normal SATA drive. It’s well worth it.

You also double the chances of drive-failure by doing this. I make sure that ONLY media captured from tapes (that I keep) end up on those drives. If they crash, I just have to re-capture. Absolutely everything else (music, graphics, project files, titles) is saved on one of my other 2 drives which are backed up regularly.

So you get speed at the expence of safety, but it’s worth it to me to get faster compression times. By following my rule of vidoe-tape-only on the RAID, I don’t risk too much.

[Rick Wise]

Great. I get it: by “Media Drive” you mean a separate hard drive for the raw video, which is also very necessary for editing in Vegas. The Raid set-up makes great sense. When these crash, do you have to replace them, or is there a way to restore their usability (though not their contents, I presume)?

Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
http://www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com