What upgrades make iMac better for Final Cut?

The best upgrade for an iMac is to get a Mac Pro (tower).

-DH

I disagree, for the first time ever. I think this new iMac will SCREAM! I want one. Just get the base hard drive, but look for THUNDERBOLT hard drives...those will be very fast and perfect for video.

And capture card makers are making thunderbolt connectable cards soon...so BONUS.

It may scream, but there's still the limited expandability/connectivity issues.

-DH

Dennis... I think you will be happy with the new iMac running Final Cut Pro. If you have an Apple store near by, you should visit the store and give the iMac a run through using FCS 3. A few weeks back I went into an Apple store to test run the new iMac. The 27" that I used was an i5 with the basic setup. I was very pleased with the response the iMac had with FCP I ordered one... I order the 27" i7 fully decked out.

3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB

2TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive

AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5

Apple Magic Mouse + Magic Trackpad

Apple Wireless Keyboard (English) & User's Guide

Accessory Kit

This setup takes 4-6 to deliver because of the addition of the SSD. I have two left before delivery... YEAH!!!

If you are planning on getting FCP X you might want to to think about maxing out the ram to 16 gigs. You can do that now or later. You can have Apple install the ram or buy ram from a third party vendor which will be half the cost. Definitely order it with 8 gigs of ram.

That's just it David...now it DOES offer proper connectivity. THUNDERBOLT opens the doors for a lot of things. Capture cards will connect via Thunderbolt (AJA, Decklink, Matrox all working on this...Matrox to have a Thunderbolt adapter in July)...fast hard drive arrays will be on Thunderbolt (Promise had an 8 drive bay doing 800MB/s on a Laptop).

I tell ya...I want one.

Shane... THUNDERBOLT...BINGO!

The video sample I messed with on the 27" i5 was a 15 second ProRes 4444 1080p (part of) Apple trailer. I copied the video to the timeline four times so I could have an one minute final video to work with... I place a few filters to each video segment to where I needed to render the footage. The iMac had no problems playing back the un-render footage. Render time was very fast (I didn't have a stop watch.). Sending to h.264 was very fast too! Faster than real time encoding. All in all I was very impressed.

There is a video on YouTube showing a 27" playing three 1080p trailers onto three separate 27" screens at the same time with no problems. Makes you think about the new iMac capabilities.

I didn't have much time on the new iMac, about an hour. I was impress with the machine in that little time. Believe me when it get the new iMac (in a few weeks), the first thing I will do before doing anything else is to run it through FCS and see what it is made of.

Now to find a Thunderbolt drive... just to try preferably.

LaCie promises one for this summer.