What is the best value iMac config for hd video editing. I was going to go for i5 3.1 ghz with 4mb ram, but should I go further? Thanks!

I'd go with more RAM (but you can add that later, buying it from OWC (macsales.com) or Crucial; I do a fair amount of video editing and have 12 GB total (the 4 GB original and added 2 x 4 GB from OWC).

Your choice of the 27 inch 3.1ghz is good.

The more screen space the better when doing editing work.

Like Babowa recommended, Top the RAM as much as possible for faster work.

One more thing I would recommend, get a large hard drive. HD Video editing will take a lot of disk space!

A fast external drive is a good idea. It's always a good idea to keep your media separate from your OS drive.

In case your computer is broken or stolen, your precious media is still available to work on with a different computer if needed.

Only other option to get a faster Mac system is to go for a Mac Pro.

But your question was about the best iMac config.

It should more enough for FCPX.

Final Cut Pro X specs:

Remember that rendering/encoding are s.l.o.w. processes - they take time, even on a top of the line processor with RAM to spare. A friend of mine used to work for a major TV station and they had 6 computers running 24 hours a day processing the various videos from reporters, etc. I'm sure they had good equipment, but it was slow there too.

A couple of things to consider: don't do anything else while it's doing its' thing and turn the screen saver and sleep to never - both of those will help. I just got the 2.93 GHz quad core iMac with 12 GB RAM - it is about 35% faster with FCE and iMovie than my (almost previous) 3.2 GHz - I just tested that with a short test movie on both. Must be the quad core I'm guessing - they are both mid 2010.

I've been told recently that final cut pro won't run on Lion, which most of the new Macs include. is this not true?

You might want to consider asking that particular question in the Pro Applications forums where knowledgeable folks who are using these apps hang out; in the meantime.....

I'm not sure, but believe I saw a thread and the problem was that FCP is universal and will run, but its' installer is PPC and will not - also depends on the version you have. I had the same problem with Final Cut Express, but since I had a Snow Leopard machine, I manually dragged over every FCE file and it actually worked!

ThespecificationsI gave in my last post say that FCPX will work with Lion.

Here they are again:

Final Cut Pro X specs:

• Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better.
• 2GB of RAM (4GB of RAM recommended).
• OpenCL-capable graphics card or
  Intel HD Graphics 3000 or later.
• 256MB of VRAM (512MB of VRAM recommended).
• Display with 1280-by-768 resolution or higher.
• OS X v10.6.8 or OS X v10.7.2 or later (OS X v10.7.2 or later for broadcast monitoring).
• 2.4GB of disk space.

I thought the post I replied to mentioned "final cut pro" (without the X), but maybe the X was just forgotten....

FCP 7 is what I've been working on.

You have it currently installed? Can you go to the System Profiler and click on Applications (will take a while to populate) - take a look at your FCP and check what it says on the right - Universal, Intel, or PPC? It'll look like this:

If it's Universal or Intel, it'll run in Lion. However, the installer may or may not be PPC - that you may not know until you try to install. If you have it currently installed, then you could do what I did - move over all the files manually. I have a list of files for FCE and would assume they'd be the same with FCP: copy them from the old Mac and insert them in the very same spots on the new one.

Here is the list for FCE:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA38198?viewlocale=en_US

(It was published for an uninstall, but worked like a charm).

Final Cut Pro 7.0.3 and FCPX are compatible with Lion

See here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4769

There was a bit of confusion due to the fact that the OP (SFToy) was talking about FCPX but a second poster (MBpeiile) was talking about FCP.

What about the installer for the FCP 7? Would you happen to know?

babowa,

From what I read, the FCP 7 installer wont work on Lion.

But I found this link that explains a simple work around that seems to work.

http://www.photoethnography.com/blog/2011/08/installing-fina.html

BUT I also found this site that says FCP 7 is very buggy on Lion.

http://finalcutwhiz.com/news/final-cut-and-lion/

So, FCPX is said to install well and work well with Lion, but for FCP 7 it's a mixed review.

thanks so much -- that clears up some of what I've heard. Now I need to figure out what to buy in a new computer and not lose all of my projects made on FCP 7!