AC160 How well will editing AC160 footage on a new iMac work?

M

MarcM

Active member
I have the newest imac:
3.2 GHz Core i5
24GB RAM
OSX.8.4

Using Premiere Pro CS6

Can anyone offer and idea of how well the AC160 clips will edit on this iMac?
I'm just looking into a HiDef camera after a decade of MiniDV and the 160 seems good albeit kinda expensive being a thousand $ more than the 130 for not much more than 1080P at 60fps. I'm just wondering how bogged down this (almost best) imac will run these AVCHD files.
 
Thanks but...

Thanks but...

Prism Video said:
With FCPX it will be a dream....with all that RAM.....it takes time to render, but you can do that in the background.
Click to expand...

Thanks but I've left FCP because of FCPX. It's just not for me. Was pretty hard, I've been using FCP since vers. 1.2.
 
The following info applies to both MAC and PC:

I recently built a windows machine to edit video on. In the process of planning my build I researched how Adobe Premiere works with computer hardware. There are several aspects to "how well clips will edit" on a computer (mac or pc).

If you are talking about how smooth you can scrub through the timeline - this is determined by the video card (if you are able to take advantage of the hardware acceleration that Premiere offers). The more powerful your video card (a combination of VRam and processing power -more of both is better), the smoother you will be able to scrub around the time line without any jerks or delays no matter what compression the source material uses.

If your video card has low Vram (like 1GB or less), your hard drive speed can affect scrubbing because your vram isnt able to buffer the entire timeline. In this case, you would want a SSD hard drive (pro SSD drives are faster than a raid setup with traditional spindle drives). You can test your hard drive speed using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test (no download link but you can find it if you look hard enough). This test is made by the same people that make the Black Magic cinema cameras.

If you are talking about how fast videos will render once you have finished the edit, this is determined by the CPU you have on board. A 3.2 GHz i5 does not have hyper threading so your computer will render out very slow. In contrast, a 3.2GHz i7 does have hyperthreading which essentially doubles the cores in the eyes of the computer (so a quad core i5 would be seen by the computer as having 4 cores while a quad core i7 would be viewed as an 8 core processor by the computer). As a general rule, the more cores your computer has, the faster things render because the numbers get crunched faster.

There are some exceptions to this rule. For instance an overclocked 6 core i7 is faster than a xeon 8 core processor because you cant overclock a xeon processor. Overclocking (as far as I know) cant really be done on a mac so you are stuck with factory settings. If you do overclock a processor, you need to know what you are doing and it can get pretty technical. I have great performance and stability with my overclocked rig using a water cooling block on the CPU.

SYSTEM RAM (i forgot to mention this): System ram is what the CPU uses to buffer processes and Vram (or Video card ram) is what your video card uses to buffer graphics. System ram is important in that for Adobe Premiere (also applies to After Effects) you will idealy want 4GB per physical CPU core (more if you can afford it) and this is important. If you have a bunch of cores but dont have the system ram to support those cores, it actually slows down the performance of Adobe Premiere and After Effects.

To test your CPU rendering performance, download a free program called "Cinebench" (made by Maxon, the same people that make Cinema 4D) and run the CPU test. It basically renders out a 3D scene and your score is based on the speed at which your CPU renders the scene. My computer scores a 12.04 which is higher than a Xeon 8 core processor (which scores 11.69).

You can download it here: http://www.maxon.net/?id=1258
 
Last edited:
You can build a windows based PC for a fraction of the cost of a Mac and get better performance.
 
I agree, I also started using Premiere because of the new FC (It just bites compared to what it was). So what I have done is just revamped my Mac Pro. Maxed out the ram to 32, reinstalled the OS and built an array of RAID 10 6TB (4 3TB drive, by keeping the platters small they access faster, also you need to know the all the specs of the drives!) of storage and redundant back up because of the RAID 10 and my drives are at 300 Read/Write. Added a 2nd Blue-ray drive (got tired of going back and forth to my PC to make blue-rays), added a Cuda Card (most important for after effects!!!! Also not cheap for a MAC), and a Black Magic card for video to feed my preview monitor. Thats what I have done to help, after effects runs ok, but once this MAC reaches its end of life, I will be building a PC system as its more cost effective, sad to say MAC is not really for the video end user lately, unless you call making a movie on a iPad a video user??? (sorry just rambling)
 
ELN614 said:
You can build a windows based PC for a fraction of the cost of a Mac and get better performance.
Click to expand...

I don't know why every workflow post ends up with someone saying "you can build a PC for half the price" or "switch to a Mac and you're all set".

The OP asked a specific question, he didn't mention wanting to dump his brand-new machine and change his workflow to a different OS.

There's a multi-page mac-vs-pc thread over on BMC user, I'd suggest you go there to debate building a PC vs. buying a Mac. It's page after page of people declaring their allegiance to Mac, PC, or Hackintosh. Everyone has very valid reasons with solid experiences and logically thought-out uses for their platform. Go take a look. Or accept my summary: you're not going to change anyone's mind. There are reasons to desire either platform. There's no reason to fill every damn thread with white noise while avoiding specific answers that actually help the OP out. Which (I assume) is why we're here, to get help or be helpful.

As for workflow, if you don't like on-the-fly rendering of AVCHD... I transcode my cards through FCP6 to Pro Res, doesn't take long. I've done on-set edits on a 4-year old MBP this way while packing my gear. Don't know how Premiere deals with AVCHD but there's likely workarounds to get your footage into an edit-friendlier format if needed, with batch processing, etc. Then archive your entire card for safety.

Nothing beats testing things yourself, too.
 
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