
When using external storage, you really don’t need lots of internal storage. One of my systems has a 3 TB Fusion drive. (An extra TB for $100 makes this a better value than the 2 TB Fusion drive.) If you don’t plan to purchase external storage – and you will, you just don’t know it yet – get the 3 TB Fusion drive. If you want an excellent balance between performance, price and capacity, stay with the 1 TB Fusion drive. All the files in macOS will take less than 30 GB, leaving plenty of room for working files and immediate storage. If you want maximum performance AND you plan to store media on an external drive, get the 512 GB SSD. NOTE: Here is an updated article on storage speeds and media requirements that explains the load your storage system needs to carry. Which means that a Fusion drive works fastest with files you access over and over. The OS watches what you do and moves files onto the SSD based upon what you are using most. For example, the 1 TB Fusion uses a 32 GB SSD, while the 2 and 3 TB Fusion drives use a 128 GB SSD. Keep in mind that the SSD portion of a Fusion drive is only a part of the total storage. They are an excellent balance between the speed of an SSD with the storage capacity of spinning media. I own two iMacs with Fusion drives and I remain very impressed with these systems. I really like that Apple has put Fusion drives into all but two of their iMacs.

If you are doing multicam, 4K or HDR editing, or lots of video compression, the i9 is worth the money. Unlike the i5, the i9 supports multithreading. The choice in the 27″ iMac is harder: between i5 and i9, because it’s a $500 differential. The i7 is worth the money because of its support for multi-threading. UPDATE: The choice in the 21.5″ iMac is between i5 and i7. While CPU speed is important, it is not critical for video editing remember, iMacs that were current as recently as last month, were easily able to edit almost all forms of SD, HD, and 4K media.Īny of the processors in any of the new iMacs will be fine for video or audio editing. UPDATE Intel’s latest 8th-gen and 9th-gen Core processors, including up to a 3.2GHz six-core 8th-gen Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz for the 21.5-inch 4K iMac and up to a 3.6GHz eight-core 9th-gen Core i9 with Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz for the 27-inch 5K iMac. While this won’t help when transcoding into ProRes, hardware-acceleration will significantly speed compressing files for the web. NOTE: Both H.264 and the up-coming H.265 video codecs are hardware-accelerated in all the new hardware. In which case, you can save money and improve performance with a 21″ system. However, if the purpose of the new system is video compression, you don’t need the bigger screen size.

I prefer to easily read the text to seeing every pixel in my image. So I’ve lowered the screen resolution using System Preferences to make the text larger. I’ve discovered, that while seeing a 5K image is nice, the on-screen text is often very hard to read. NOTE: One of my iMacs is an older 5K iMac. Plus, all the new 27″ iMacs now share the same 5K Retina Display. This is not to say they work poorly on smaller screens, but both of these display a LOT of elements on screen. I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple creates – but, as I mentioned earlier, I still need to pay my bills today.Īnd that leads us directly to the latest updates to the iMac.īoth Final Cut Pro X and Premiere interfaces work best on larger screens.
#MAC BOOK PRO MEMORY FOR VIDEO EDITING MAC#
Given what Apple has announced for the iMac Pro, however, that upcoming Mac Pro will need to be a true screamer to compete. Keep in mind, however, that Apple has already announced they are working on a new, top-of-the-line Mac Pro which will ship sometime in 2019. Given the latest iMac releases, there are very, very few reasons to purchase a Mac Pro right now especially given its price.

It will work great and you’ll have bragging rights over all the other systems.īut, if money IS an object, then you need to make trade-offs, balancing the performance you need with the money you have. If money is no object, buy the top of the line iMac. My recommendations are based on past experience, current system specs and talking with informed individuals.

NOTE: I have not purchased any of these systems. This article is designed to help you make more informed choices when you don’t have a lot of money to spend. However, if you are on a budget, how do you determine where to spend your money? These new systems sport a variety of very exciting features. At their WWDC, in June, 2017, Apple announced and released new iMac computers, designed to meet the needs of professionals.
