Need a new iMac & MacBook Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro

Need a new iMac & MacBook Pro

Posted by Carlton Hathcoat on September 19, 2018 at 2:23 pm

Good afternoon,

I am planning to upgrade from my Mid 2010 Mac Pro to an iMac. I traditionally don’t do a lot of high end graphics (for the most part my Mid 2010 has been enough), but I recently purchased a Sony FS7 Mark II and while I haven’t had a need to shoot in 4K yet, I am sure that I will be doing a lot of 4K in the near future, so I definitely need to upgrade. The question I have is this: Is the iMac a good enough machine for editing motion graphics and 4K videos, and if so what specs do you recommend? Or should I be considering iMac Pro? If I go with iMac Pro, what specs are recommended?
I realize that in the perfect world I would go with the best I can get, but my older MacBook Pro Logic board crapped out yesterday and I have to replace that immediately, which makes my budget a little difficult. I would like to stay under $6,000 for both, but if the professional opinion is to go with iMac Pro I am willing to do it, or get the top of line iMac instead of bottom line iMac Pro.

The MacBook Pro I am planning to buy is the Mid 2018 with following Specs:

$2,799
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 Six-Core
16GB of 2400 MHz RAM | 512GB SSD
15.4″ 2880 x 1800 Retina Display
AMD Radeon Pro 560X GPU (4GB GGDR5)

Is this enough to edit 4K our should I upgrade this MacBook Pro?

Here are specs I am looking at for iMac:

$2,699
4.2GHz quad-core 7th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz
16GB 2400MHz DDR4
2TB Fusion Drive
Radeon Pro 580 with 8GB video memory.

Is 16GB enough memory?

Here are Specs for iMac Pro:

$4,999
3.2GHz 8-core Intel Xeon W processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
32GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory
Radeon Pro Vega 56 with 8GB of HBM2 memory
1TB SSD

Also, I don’t know anything about the new Fusion Drives, so any info on that would be helpful.

Thanks, I look forward to the feedback.

Oliver Peters replied 7 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Oliver Peters
September 19, 2018 at 4:44 pm

Your Mac Pro will still work with 4K video, but you would really need to invest in fast storage. Plus commit to possibly transcoding your footage to something optimized before editing and/or use a proxy workflow.

The machines listed are fine, but get more than 16GB of RAM. Same issue applies regarding storage. Don’t put the media on the internal system drive, unless it’s a fairly small project with fast turnaround. Fusion drives are fine, but SSDs are better for performance, especially if your editing cache files are there.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
Carlton Hathcoat
September 19, 2018 at 5:50 pm

Thanks,

I am more of a producer/DP who edits a bit, so working with proxy files is not something I have experience with. What drives do you recommend for fast drives to edit to?
Oliver Peters
September 19, 2018 at 5:57 pm

[carlton hathcoat] “What drives do you recommend for fast drives to edit to?”

Depends on how much capacity, what performance level, and cost. I’m partial to the Promise Pegasus RAID series. Pegasus3 for newer Thunderbolt3-enabled machines. An 8-drive enclose would be best, if you have lots of media. However, this is for editing at a “home base”, not on-the-go.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

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