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Running FCP on an Intel iMac
We’re looking into getting a new system at our office (currently we are running PowerPC G5’s Dual 2Ghz OS 10.4.8 and FCP 5.0.4) and want to put together a “budget” system.
How will the performance of a new 24″ Intel iMac 2.66Ghz compare to getting one of the new Mac Pro’s?
Will an iMac be sufficent? By sufficent I mean, will it run as least as good as the older G5s. (as in driving Motion)
We’re simply doing DV setups: All DV footage, firewire LaCie drives etc.
It seems to me to be an even faster setup than the G5 in that it has faster processors, but the system buses are much slower, will this be a problem? I can’t stand systems that are slow to respond…
Jeff
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4 Replies
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The 24″ iMac’s are very nice and can do a pretty good job at running many pro applications. For DV editing you should be fine as long as you are using external drives and bump the RAM up to at least 2gb. If you want to run Motion, the iMac will never do as well as the new towers. However, i would go with 3gb of memory in it and bump up the graphics card to the nvidia 7600 (you should do both of those anyway).
The negatives with the iMac’s. compared to the new intel Mac towers, is that they are not very expandable: no extra internal drives, no hi-end graphics cards like the awesome ATI X1900 (really helps with Motion), limited to only 3gb of RAM (16gb in the towers), and no PCIe slots (meaning no capture cards, FW cards, SATA cards, Fibre cards, etc). The iMac also has less ports to connect all your devices to. There’s only one FW 400 and one FW 800 port on the new iMac’s so you’ll need FW 800 external drives if you are planning on connecting a camera at the same time.
There’s probably many more pro’s and cons, but those were the first things that came to mind.
Tony!
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You’ll lose the ability to expand your system further, but you’ll get fairly good performance. Be sure to:
1) Get 2 GB of RAM at least. 3 would be great but I know it’s pricey. 2 GB will be ok.
2) Try and get a firewire 800 drive and use that for media.
3) Upgrade the graphics to the 256 MB chipFor DV footage, you’ll do fine for Final Cut. It won’t be the fastest Motion machine, but it should be smooth enough to use. Compare the iMacs video card to your G5s card. That’s the biggest hint you’ll get to be able to tell if it will be the same or better or worse…by comparing that.
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One place that the MacPro will dominate is rendering and encoding. For DV editing the iMac will be a strong system but if Motion is going to be a major part of what you are doing you may want to consider going with the MacPro.
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No, Motion isn’t a huge part of what we do. I just don’t want to end up with a system that is slower than the older G5 we are running now.
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