Which Mac desktop to get for FCP Studio or FCP X

[Brett Ausbrooks]

I have a 2006 iMac and I am running FCP7 and CS3 on it w/o any issues. I upgraded my ram and HD & that is it. The new iMacs are even better, so FCP7 or FCP X should work seamlessly.

[Bret Williams]

A tower? iMacs will run FCP X better than Mac towers. Towers don’t have sandy or ivy bridge, a key part in acceleration of FCP X. They don’t have thunderbolt either.

But the current iMacs are really only good for FCP X. Marginal for Adobe Premiere, and just plain horrible for After Effects CS6 becuase they don’t utilize the ATI graphics card. You’re talking days to render out something in 3D in AE, vs. hours.

But the iMac announced on Tuesday has nVidia cards. Should work with Premiere, After Effects, all the adobe stuff, and of course FCP X. To me, they really are the thing to get, hands down.

Apple hasn’t made a tower in 2 and a half years. There isn’t one on display at their stores. They’ve announced they’re coming out with something “later in 2013.” Whether than means later from now, in the year 2013 or later within the year 2013 is up to Apple I guess.

[Richard Herd]

My iMacs, FCPX, PPr arrive next week — for a high school program. Avid ($300 for teachers and students, a truely great deal) arrives next year, as I am waiting on grant money.

[Richard Herd]

[Bret Williams] “Marginal for Adobe Premiere”

What do you mean by that? I will be using it for high school students, so the machines get heavy heavy heavy use, but the actual projects are not that difficult by themselves (if that makes sense).

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

What leaves me doubtful about the iMac is not the ability to run FCPX. It’s in the fact that an external thunderbolt or FW800 RAID array will be needed. While the internal drives in my Mac Pro are totally quiet, all my external arrays are too noisy to work all day with, so that I only use them for storage or backup. And I have always had troubles with fanless single disk external enclosures, quiet enough but maybe not cool enough for hard editing. With the two TB ports the iMac could be completed with an external array, a second monitor, and a Blackmagic box to output a real time preview, and I imagine that would make it a great machine.

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy

[Paul Jay]

The new iMacs with Nvidia kepler graphics will scream CUDA with Premiere and Davinci and also will scream Open CL with FCPX.

Best choice. No doubt.

[Rick Lang]

Sandra, is there primarily only one person going to use your new machine? If it’s for a single operator, the new iMac should hold its own for what you described.

Not sure if you need external storage for anything other than archive/backup so the iMac with the 3TB internal drive may be fine. Prices for the Fusion drive haven’t been announced but if they are reasonable, go with 3TB+128GB Fusion drive. If you do want external storage for media and editing using FCPX, you’ll need a bigger budget. Maybe something that can be deferred until another year.

You may not require the fastest graphics as the GTX 675MX with 1GB graphics memory may suit you but if you can try for the GTX 680MX with 2GB graphics memory. And for the main system memory, recommend 16GB as I doubt you’ll need the maximum 32GB. Will be interesting to see what you can get for your $4,000 budget but we have to wait several weeks to see prices and availability. Good luck.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Bret Williams] “Marginal for Adobe Premiere, and just plain horrible for After Effects CS6 becuase they don’t utilize the ATI graphics card. You’re talking days to render out something in 3D in AE, vs. hours. “

Thats not reeeally true – I just spent a week in berlin doing motion graphics promo pieces for a japanese electronics firm launching lots of tvs and laptops – I was fashioning piles of floating GUI elements popping up around the kit using the 3D camera tracker (which is awesome).

An iMac i7 with a full complement of ram – is a very, very, very nice AE station.

You’re right about the openGL limitations as it relates to full raytracing renders, but as Stu Maschwitz pointed out – adobe have gone for a computationally expensive raytrace engine. Its a good fundamental flag in the ground, but, bottom line, with a good anti aliased render, you are going to be waiting a seriously long time per frame in almost any use case, cuda or no.

As to openGL in the workspace, I don’t know very many AE people that have much truck with it. Its a tricky proposition, its better than it was, but my instinct, in nearly all mo-graph situations, is to disable openGL previews.

again with premiere – Cuda will get you optimised performance with certain sets of plugins, and more importantly, with certain dissolves, but – and this is an important but – cuda has not got much to say about the performance of the timeline itself from an editing standpoint. your processor (hello i7 hyperthreading) and hefty doses of ram is going to kick out that multiformat timeline.

Bottom line – I hefted that iMac to and from berlin in a steel roady case, and I fell deeply in love with it. And more importantly, if you look at the back of the new iMac coming in december there is a massive engraved “Nvidia 2GB” logo on it. Its impossible not to think that adobe are going to prep and certify the nvidia card on that machine for CS6.

That new imac is it basically – it will run FCPX like a monster, and it should be fit for pretty full on mercury duty as well.

me wantee. me havee – having prevaricated for just long enough.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Jeremy Garchow]

The new iMacs announced a few days ago are what you want, as has been mentioned. They aren’t released until late this year, though (November/December).

You don’t want a mac mini, but the mac mini is approaching current MacPro speeds

https://www.tuaw.com/2012/10/25/mac-mini-catches-2010-mac-pro-in-benchmark-tests/

I am sure the iMac with it’s CUDA capable GPU will fair just as well if not better.

Jeremy

[John Davidson]

Get a fully loaded imac and a promise pegasus thunderbolt array. It’s plenty fast and more advanced than the current tower offerings. iMacs due in December.

This was made very quickly in AE on the last version of the iMac. Render took a few minutes, tops, and it uses a silly amount of plugins.

https://reels.creativecow.net/film/playing-with-element-3d

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.