Switching to the Apple side of the force...

K

Kugar13

Well-known member
Hello all,

I will be purchasing my first Apple computer soon for editing RED footage (RED ONE). I'm looking at the iMac, 16GB, Quad core, etc. I was wondering if anyone having experience with RED footage thought 16GB would sufficient. Any FCP advice concerning RED footage? I've heard the workflow can be a pain, but I don't know the gritty details. Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks! :cheesy:
 
It's hard to say what anything will be like at this stage of Final Cut Pro's product cycle but, if you've been following NAB, you will have seen the new Final Cut Pro X. It has some improvements over the old Final Cut Pro which should make working with RED footage less painful. Native editing should mean the end of transcoding to an intermediate, Grand Central Dispatch will let it take better advantage of multiple CPU cores, the background rendering is supposed to be assisted by the GPU and true 64 bit support means that it can take advantage of all the memory which is installed on the system, not just 4 GB like the current version. It's supposed to drop some time in June for $299. In theory it should be awesome, hopefully its RED support is also top notch.
 
If you buy an Imac now you may regret in a couple of weeks as 2011 Imacs ( most possibly thunderbolted) are coming soon.
 
Awesome guys! Thanks for the info. I don't need the new system for a few months.... that will give me some time to do additional research and learn more about the upcoming releases and such!
 
As a side not, storage and transfer speed will be relatively import. The Thunderbolt iMacs should solve those issues in the near future. Currently 8Gigs is enough for editing most any HD footage you have. With background rendering, it may...or may run fast with more memory.
See http://www.barefeats.com/ before purchasing a new iMac with "said" amount of RAM (Of course follow the release of the new FCP and 2011 iMacs)
I personally love my iMac , but could use a rendering farm when it comes to the final output.

Dai-Lon Weiss
http://www.dailonweiss.com/
http://www.kristinaweiss.com/Magyar/

Panasonic GH2
Nikon D700
iMac i7
 
FYI, I don't think you can put more than 8GB of RAM in any of the current iMac models.

I run FCP 7 on my 27" i5 with the standard 4GB, and I've not had any issues.
 
All macs can support more memory then they come stocked with.
It comes with 4 slots. 2 of which are taken up by 2G chips. You have 2 spare and can fit 4G chips in each slot. Click your "apple" in the upper left corner fo the screen, go about this mac then get more info. Look under Memory.
http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=1
Programs like After Effects which offer background rendering chew up available memory.

Currently, FCP really can run fine with 4Gs, but in the future with background rendering and probably native AVCHD support ...FCP will definitely need more then 4G.

With multi processing and multicore computers...rule of thumb is to have at least 1G of ram for each core. i5/i7 have 4 cores, so 4Gs is bare minimum. http://www.barefeats.com/ did a test on the first i3 - i7 iMacs and found that there is no performance increase after 8Gs. But, OS Lion may change that... as well as the new FCP.
 
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