Comments on: The iMac: Transformation Into Editing Bliss

By: axhead

axhead — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:25:37 +0000

WIth my 24″ IMAC is my external hard drive the capture disk as well as he scratch disk?

By: The MAC lord

The MAC lord — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:36:32 +0000

I’ve been in the video Business for 11 years. I’ve used a Power Mac G5 for the past 4. I’ve used and IMAC as well for the past year. Witt that said I agree with the article. YOu can do some pro level editing with the IMAC. Obviously the Mac Pro is faster but you can still get alot done with the IMAC.

By: Pro All The Way

Pro All The Way — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:40:07 +0000

I agree with the MacPro comment above. Half of making money in “pro video” is making good use of time. The encode times on a MacPro will likely justify its extra expense in a matter of days. We use 3 of them here and do a lot of distributed processing just to keep encode times reasonable. The iMac is a nice shiny toy for FCE users, sure, but the very notion that it would suffice for video “pros” is absurd. I get that everyone has a budget but I’d highly disagree with this article. The iMac is competent at editing, sure, but compositing, color correction and encoding (all 3 of which are staples in the modern age of vieo editing) demand something with more power when deadlines are a consideration, and when aren’t they?

I’m not knocking the iMac – I’m simply suggesting that when time equals money you’d save a lot of both with a high initial investment. At our hourly rate I’d venture to say that we’d make up the difference in less than a week, easily.

By: Hardware Hunter

Hardware Hunter — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:10:48 +0000

Dual monitors really make most sense, it just gives one so much more desktop space, and the ability to have two different things side by side, enabling one to compare and cross reference without having to minimise one to get to the other. Definitely works for me!

By: AidanH

AidanH — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:40:40 +0000

I have a very similar setup – imac 24″, Dell 24″ Ultrassharp (Desperately want an apple display but my friend had a spare dell so couldn’t bring my poor student self to pay for the apple yet!) and a stack of various hard drives including 2 1tb Mybook studios, 1 mirroring the other which stores all completed projects. I have produced some fantastic results and couldn’t be happier with the setup, but I do know that as I finish my course and start to do real professional level editing and compositing that I’ll have to step up my kit and get a mac pro. Until then though I am very happy.

By: Richard Hather

Richard Hather — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:04:02 +0000

I agree with article and can relate if you’re trying to get the best bang for your buck. I am all for working within your own means and budget but one thing that you dont mention is “time is money”. And for a freelancer, it should be considered as important as your equipment. An iMac has 6MB shared L2 cache at full processor speed and 1066MHz frontside bus, the Pro Mac has 12MB of L2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6MB) and 1600MHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses. I am working on one of those new shiny ProMacs with those specs, and if I were to switch to the iMac, it would probably take me a few hours longer if not more do my ripping and processing. Time that I cannot afford to waste when I am on my own clock.

Its what I considered when purchasing all of my equipment. Also too, the iMac is not nearly as expandable as the ProMac, which can last longer as it wouldn’t need to be replaced by a newer machine.

By: Winston

Winston — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:18:45 +0000

While I agree with most of what you’re saying, there’s one thing that would make for better editing performance. Instead of going with the externals you mentioned, try building your own.

On OWC you can get professional cases (FW800 and USB 2.0) that hold one or two drives for relatively cheap, and just monitor the prices on drives to buy a size that you want at incredible deals (I recently bought a 1TB 7200RPM 32mb cache drive for 122 shipped, and I’ve seen them cheaper since). The upside of this is that with these enclosures, you can define the drive setup; very handy if you want to RAID together drives or mirror them to have your data safer while you edit.

The further benefit is that you can easily upgrade the drives later on, say if you buy a 500gb drive now, and get a better deal on a 1.5 terabyte drive later, then it’s a simple upgrade for your external.

Furthermore, those cases on OWC use top-of-the-line chipsets giving you better performance and reliability. I work at an Apple Service Center and I see way too many hard drive crashes from video editors who use cheaper externals for me to ever trust anything cheap external wise again. Go for something made for video and you won’t regret it.

By: Eg

Eg — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:08:06 +0000

Nice setup, but you seem to have forgotten one a real timesaver:
A ShuttlePRO or ShuttleXpress from Contour Design makes the editing so much faster.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:03:28 +0000

I have this same setup, second tier 20″ iMac, 4gb ram, second 20″ cinema display. And while I mainly work on web sites for photography, I have been doing some video editing lately. I have to agree that this is a great set-up, and I really can’t justify the extra expense of going with something more. I still keep my macbook around for portability, but it is really hard to argue with the bang for the buck you get with the iMac!

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:18:33 +0000

I have to agree with the comments here, I also have the 20″ plus a 22″ monitor plugged in which gives me a huge area in which to work. I upped the ram and find it pretty quick for almost all the work I do.

Most people who see it for the first time expect a box somewhere that is actually the computer, finding it hard to believe that it’s all in the one shell!