FCP on IMAC

[sandy shapiro] "I've heard rumors and see signs that Apple will discontinue their MacPro towers. Where do you see the future of Apple computers moving for editors? It seems as though the IMac will be powerful enough to handle heavy editing. Do you agree that this will be our machine of choice if we stay with Apple?
"

Many of us don't believe the rumours, but if you take a browse through the forum there is plenty of speculation on here.

However a top spec 27" iMac with lots of RAM and a Thunderbolt drive would be a very good FCPX system.

Steve Connor
"FCPX Agitator"
Adrenalin Television

[Brad Davis] "For business to take Apple seriously in a business environment they have to transparent to a degree before companies drop large sums of cash on infrastructure"

Then the clones will come out before the originals...

Although my current experience with FCPX is very limited, I just got my wife a new iMac and, of course, she needed it with the best graphics and fastes i7 core and then I upgraded it to 16Mb. Did not spring for an SSD but I can tell you that it is quite a sweet machine and FCPX run's quite nice. She might have a hard time getting it back..... but to your other point. I have a Oct 2011 MBP with an SSD and I just upgraded it to 16Gb of ram and added a second internal HD (momentus 750Gb hybrid) using the optical drive conversion kit from MacSales. It was a great laptop before an now it plain rocks. FCPX as well as everything else I run works quite nice. Would have preferred a Quadro Graphics card for the other software I run but all in all it works great for just about everything. I have no need for legacy work (broadcast or tape) so the lack of an expansion bus is moot for me and with T-bolt raid drives showing up current and future iMac's should work just fine for lots of editors. Precise color grading on a glossy monitor is not ideal but again. for lots of people this is not so much a "must have" as a "like to have".

Sorry to go off topic, but Jim have you made the tutorial for "bussing" audio around FCPX, yet?

Thanks!

Thanks Jim!

This weekend I'll be sitting down to work on a mix for a short movie.

I've divided each scene into Compound Clips. The next step is the score, fx, foley, and dialogue mix. Normally I do this in Pro Tools, but this project is for me to learn FCPX, so I'm really trying to stay in X.

I'm sure I'll have questions.

Thanks

Here's a contrarian view.

Editorial apps do run nicely on new iMacs with Thunderbolt, but editorial performance is largely bandwidth-bound. After Effects may be bandwidth-bound on simple comps, but more involved comps usually become CPU-bound or RAM-bound.

I'm a heavy AE/C4D user, and for applications like those, I think workstation power is still worthwhile. See this recent Barefeats AE benchmark [link] which compares a Mac Pro with some iMacs (and keep in mind the Mac Pro was only a 6-core with 16 GB of RAM).

I'm optimistic that Apple will release another Mac Pro, but I've decided not to rely exclusively on Apple hardware and software anymore [link]. On the PC platform, there's a lot more choice: there are several quality vendors manufacturing workstations. I've been working with a Z800 provided by HP alongside my Macs here in my office. The hardware is well-designed and well-built, there are more powerful CPU and GPU configurations available than on the Mac platform, Windows 7 pretty much "just works" now, and once you're in a cross-platform app like AE, the user experience is pretty much the same.

To answer your original question, if Apple dropped the Mac Pro, I'd probably drop Apple. As long as they continue producing machines I can use for my work, I'll continue using cross-platform workflows and using the best tool for the job at hand.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
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