iMacs and Fusion Drives

[Walter Soyka]

[Howie Young] “Hi Walter, Thanks for partaking in this discussion. I’d like to get some feedback on an iMac editing system in addition to the fusion drives. Do you suggest I post in the “FCPX Techniques forum?””

Yes, I do. That’s a great forum for specific “how to best use FCPX” questions.

I like this forum for its broader perspective, but that’s not necessarily best for a more specific question like yours. You asked about iMacs and fusion drives, and we ended up talking about Thunderbolt and Ae vs. Motion. Thanks for the jumping-off point, though!

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

[Howie Young]

Walter,

Which would be the best Cow forum to post in to inquire about a new iMac editing system?

Thanks.

[Walter Soyka]

[Howie Young] “Which would be the best Cow forum to post in to inquire about a new iMac editing system?”

I’d say it depends on the software you want to use, but most of the answers will be the same:

Buy the biggest, fastest iMac you can afford. Go for the i7 CPU if you can.

Load it up on RAM (which you can buy elsewhere like from Other World Computing to save money).

Get the beefiest GPU you can. (A 512 MB GPU will not accelerate Premiere Pro. More VRAM, more better.)

Some kind of fast internal storage (Fusion Drive or flash) will make the computer boot faster and make applications run faster. It will not necessarily improve render/export times.

You can edit off internal storage, and it will work fine, but you will probably want some kind of external Thunderbolt storage sooner or later.

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

[Howie Young]

Walter,

The software I will most likely edit with will be FCP X. Does that change the forum selection?

I thought the internal iMac system drive couldn’t be used to edit from and store media footage. Doesn’t media footage need to be kept on a separate external drive? Please explain.

What brand stand alone and RAID external Thunderbolt hard drives do you recommend?

Thanks!

[Walter Soyka]

[Howie Young] “I thought the internal iMac system drive couldn’t be used to edit from and store media footage. Doesn’t media footage need to be kept on a separate external drive? Please explain.”

In the olden days of yore, you had to keep your media files on separate drives for several very good technical reasons (capacity, throughput, fragmentation, simultaneous access to media and system/application files, etc.). If you used your system disk, you were sure to suffer terrible performance, with dropped frames left and right.

A lot of these reasons have gone away by 2013, and it’s not as verboten to use your system disk as it used to be.

That said, I still think it’s a best practice to store media externally. It’s too easy to run low on system disk space when you throw media & render files on the same drive. I also think there’s an organizational benefit to external storage.

I am not the best person to advise you on Thunderbolt storage. If you were looking at workstations and wanted to talk about PCIe-based storage, I could be a lot more helpful.

I know the Promise R4/R6 series was the only RAID on the scene for a while. There are other Thunderbolt enclosures on the market, but as far as I know (again, that’s not that far), the R6 is the one to beat.

Of course, you may not even NEED a RAID. ProRes uses only a reasonable amount of bandwidth and should work fine from a single spindle.

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

[Howie Young]

Walter,

Thanks again.