2.6ghz iMac good enough for AVCHD?

D

dominichicks

Active member
Hi
Just a quick question - I'm using an Intel 2.6ghz iMac with 4gb of ram and an Nvidia 9400 (512mb) video card.

I'm also running the latest Final Cut Studio...

Will I be able to log and transfer footage from an HMC150 through USB reasonably quickly (I'm patient but I don't want an impractical workflow), and edit with relative ease?... or do I need quadcore?

Thanks, Dom
 
I use to edit with an iMac with a 2.4ghz Core2duo before I got a Mac Pro. It worked fine, but log and transfer was almost real time. If you have an hours worth of footage, start your L&T and go find something else to do.
Also, I would recommend copying your AVCHD folder off of the card to your desktop instead relying on the USB connection from your camera. I think it's a little bit faster.
 
I run a department of 12 Mac Pro edit suites, but I edit my own projects at home on a 3 Ghz Imac. Transferring to Pro res in FCP does take a bit of time, but the resulting Pro res files play nicely on an Imac.

And I'll second what abeas said: copy the entire folder structure from the cards to a hard drive before transcoding. It's easy to set up a bunch of folders to transcode at once, so even if it's a little time consuming, you don't have to be there to baby sit the transcode.

Also, copying the cards to an external USB drive is a good idea for back-up.
 
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