What to look for in a Mac for video editing?

[Linuxcooldude]

Ouch...lol. I would say a Mac Pro with maybe minimum 12GB of ram. Maybe a hexa core machine 3.33GHZ seems to be the best bang for the buck from what I've been hearing. With at least a 64 bit video editor that would allow you to use more then 4GB of ram. iMovie is only 32 bit. Yeah you could do it on much less, but considering the amount of shows and length, render time would be quite lengthy on a lesser machine.

But hey, thats just me. I would do your research and talk with some other video editors to see what they think.

Curious, how many shows and are they 1-2 hours a piece or all together? How many times a week?

[sunkast]

Curious, how many shows and are they 1-2 hours a piece or all together? How many times a week?

List of our shows can be found here: http://www.guysfromqueens.com/showsongfq/

• AZ Show - 2 hours
• The News - 30 mins
• IJS - 1 hour
• WTT - 1 hour
• CH Show - 1 hour
• TNW - 1 hour
• FFA - 2 hours
• BBR - 1 hour
• TBT - 2 hours
• BTC - 1 hour
• IAIB Spotlight - 1 hour (bi-monthly)
• Picks of the week - 10 mins

Most shows are weekly with the occasional hiatus.

Plan is to learn Final Cut Pro to edit with. It can't be worse than the PC I have now. It does alright. But I'm looking to see if a Mac will help with the work load.

[Linuxcooldude]

Wow, thats a lot of shows...lol. Yeah, I would say a Mac Pro. Myself, I don't think I would rely on a MacBook Pro or even iMac if I had to edit that much video.

[cseeman]

I would avoid the MacPro. There's really limited benefit given that it's using just speed bumped Xeons from 2010. It might have some benefit if you were doing a lot of compression but not much for typical editing.

Currently I'd recommend MacBookPro Retina with 16GB RAM. For editing, the Ivy Bridge Quad Core i7 will do fine as well as the GPU. Many have reported that FCPX screams on such a machine.

If you're willing to wait (and it may be some months) the next iMac (current one is from early 2011) and next MacPro (may not be until next year) should be very powerful.

The amount of video isn't an issue, the codec and compositing would be a factor. The current MBPr handles AVCHD natively without issue. I think Apple demo'd 9 simultaneous using multicam.

Keep in mind you should use and external drive. A Thunderbolt RAID would be blazing fast.

[Linuxcooldude]

I would avoid the MacPro. There's really limited benefit given that it's using just speed bumped Xeons from 2010. It might have some benefit if you were doing a lot of compression but not much for typical editing.

GHZ speed is not as much as an issue in video editing as much as the amount of cores, memory & maybe dedicated video card. Usually with video editing normally it will have some kind of compression and rendering before exporting it somewhere like Youtube, Blip.tv ect. Usually the editing format video files are going to be quite large ( Like ProRes ) until you export in a more internet friendly format.

The amount of video isn't an issue, the codec and compositing would be a factor. The current MBPr handles AVCHD natively without issue. I think Apple demo'd 9 simultaneous using multicam.

Its not just the retina MBP but with any Mac that has OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion where they added better support for AVCHD.

Keep in mind you should use and external drive. A Thunderbolt RAID would be blazing fast.

Yes, should not use system drive to hold video files, but on a secondary hard drive.

[cseeman]

http://barefeats.com/mbp12ma.html
Notice how closely the MBPr performs compared to the 2010 MP (only 6 core model though).

I'll just post the comments from the tester

The Retina MacBook Pro was able to perform unrendered playback of the animated template very nearly at real-time speed (29.97 FPS). It's the first MacBook Pro in history to be able to do that. It even edged out the Mac Pro with the Radeon HD 5870 on the unrendered playback test

When it came to "Render RAM Preview" test, the MacBook Pros and the Mac Pro had enough RAM (16G and 24G respectively) to render all 600 frames of our test template in memory. The Retina MacBook Pro's GeForce GT 650M was able to render the RAM preview faster than the pricey Quadro 4000 GPU in the Mac Pro.

[cseeman]

This was in late 2011 but it's still telling when comparing the 2011 iMac to 6 core 2012 MacPro using FCPX
http://barefeats.com/fcpx01.html

The big surprise is how close the iMac and top MacBook Pro came to the Mac Pro in Final Cut Pro X performance. Of course the tests we chose and the sample video footage may have a role in that.

[Linuxcooldude]

Oh, yeah. I'm aware of this even in previous years. Typically the newer Macs seem to out do older single processor Mac Pro's ( Dual processors are a different story ). I'm still a little wary on some benchmarks in general as they can be misleading and often don't take in account on things besides CPU and maybe GPU depending on which one. I like real world testing better. But benchmarks are good for a quick reference guide.

I still think PCIe video cards tend to be a bit better then even dedicated video cards, which are usually mobile version designated by the (M) in Mac Laptops ( They definitely beat out integrated graphics ) and can be upgraded far more easier when new updated ones become available.