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Will this setup be worth my time?
I am a Final Cut 7 editor on Mac Pro tower that I use at home for freelance gigs.
My wife and I own a dental practice and I am upgrading some of our computers. I have just enough left in the budget to get a refurb iMAC 2.5ghz i5 with 4 gigs of ram. I would like to start doing some of the smaller editing I do for youtube and our website while at the office rather than having to wait until I get home to do it on my Mac Pro. Thinking about putting Final Cut X on the iMAC in the office.
Will this system work well with FInal Cut X?
2.5 ghz quad core i5 4gigs of ram.
I can always up the ram down the road. Again, this is for smaller projects, web only not for broadcast. I know the apple specs say it should, but how would this work in a real-world situation?
Is it even worth the $300 to download? Would this be so slow and buggy that I would become super frustrated?
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7 Replies
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The video card will be the deciding factor.
Here is some info:
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4664
And yes you will need to up the RAM. I would just max it out. Probably only $100.
As far as is it work the $300 for FCP. Download the trail and give it a go.
https://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/trial/
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Yes, the graphics card it comes with is on the list.
Good idea on trying the 30 day trail.
I am going run FCP7 for a while on it, I know that will work as I used to run it on a older system just fine using Apple Pro Res. Just planning ahead to the day when FCP7 is no longer supported, but by that day FCPX may not work on this system either. Either way I will have a great computer at my desk. To bad half of it will be dedicated to Windows 7 to run all of our dental apps.
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What year is that iMac?
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
It’s a 2011.
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That should work just dandy. The difference between FCP legacy and FCP X is that FCP Legacy could only access a small amount of RAM. So 4 GB of RAM was just dandy in legacy. FCP X is in the 64bit world and will try to use as much RAM as you got. So 4 GB of RAM is really pinching it.
Also the graphics card is nearly everything in FCP X. An old machine with good graphics card works well, but a new machine with a cheesie card would not be good.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
That mac is barely any different performance wise than a late 2012. BUT get an i7. MUCH more powerful at even the same speed. The i7 also supports virtual cores via hyperthreading. That should be a big help rendering / compressing.
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Not sure that matters on the small projects he has planned, though it might stay current for an extra year or two. Another concern might be an external media drive for it. The older Imac still had 800 firewire – so factor in an 800 raid. OWC has some decent affordable ones to store your media.
MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170, Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.
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