Questions pertaining to new IMAC

Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 7:41 am

I am strictly a classical location recording engineer in New York and do very little video work.

My wife is a documentary film producer and although she works in offices around the city with different edit suites, it's important that we have at home a decent system in case she works from here and needs to clean up trailers or promo's in a jiffy.

For the past several years we have had an old G4 tower with two 80Gig drives and 1.5Gigs of Ram running Fianal Cut Pro (and later HD).
I can tell the party will be over any week now and backed up last night.

The time has come and the ol' girl is slowly dying (the computer that is).

HERE IS MY QUESTION:

Is the new iMac (20 inch core duo 2.4ghz with an extra Gig of Ram) good enough to seriously run Final Cut HD, studio DVD pro, aftereffects etc......?

We have several GRaid Firewire drives we she stores data and projects.

With all the graphics intensive math ina a program like Final Cut, do I need to spend 2x as much on a desktop tower?
Isn't there a secondary graphics card in the Imac so she won't drain the cpu?

This new iMac looks 3x more powerful than my old computer and $1700 versus $3600 is a lot if there is not much that will effect us.

Any advice is welcome from people with direct experience in this area

Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 8:08 am

Processor is plenty fast in the new imac. If you get it, load it up with 4gb of RAM. One thing I don't like about editing on an iMac, you are limited to editing off of FW drives, and they will burn out when you least expect it.
It will work, but I'm not a fan of FW drive for video. Great for storage. G-techs are good.
if you have a tower you can put in 3 more SATAII drives and make a small RAID.
I don't recommend editing media and project on the same drive, like OS system drive.
Maybe G-RAID FW is better. Some of the newer FW drives are actually SATA drives inside the enclosure.

Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 6:24 am

One of the professors at the local college is making a movie on his Apple. He got a grant from the college and he invested heavily in hardware. He has a Mac G5 tower 4 Gigs of Memory two large firewire drives and a couple of more internal drives. I have seen some of the movie (I did all of the special effects and processed most of the music he is using) and it looks quite good. At the beginning of the summer he called me up in a panic. One of his external HDs had stopped working and there was no backup. We were able to get it working again but I told him the same thing that I would tell anyone who is working with hard drives - The first time you don't back them up is the only time the drive will fail. So do yourself and your wife a favor and get an EXTRA HD that you can back up to every day and before you shut off your computer do the back up.

Best of luck!

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 4:23 pm

Yep, you gotta back up. I've been using firewire drives for several years , on my Powerbook with no problems.

If you are brave and resourceful, the internal drives on all new macs are SATA, it would void your warranty, but you could route a SATA cable for connecting external SATA drives.

Cool

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 6:35 pm

I actually have a new 20' iMac with the 2.4ghz core 2 duo, 256 video card, 320 gb hard drive, and in the next day or so it will have 2 gigs ram.

It will run anything you want better than most computers. Im the happiest man on earth!

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