Is a new mac mini good enough for Final Cut Pro X?

The new Mini's specs are great.

Nothing about them indicates anything but goodness running FCP.

Russ

Going for the cheapest lowest spec machine around, can I suggest that you can expect the performance results will match.You cannot expect to get multi tracks of full HD all running together and render time that fly, expect some waiting.

If going this path seriously consider working with proxies. The HDD read and write speeds will give you some idea as to what performance you can expect.

Tony

I just went into the Apple Store today to talk to someone about this very question. FCPX system requirements for the graphics card require the Intel HD Graphics 3000 or better (anything that can run OpenCL). And with the big FCPX rewrite, the program itself can now take advantage of as many cores as you can give it, with HyperThreading and TurboBoost, and it can leverage all the RAM you can feed it.

The big disappointment to me in the new mini is that the mid-level (not server) used to have a discrete graphics card -- and now none of the minis offer anything other than the integrated graphics chipsets... although I did read on the website that the Intel HD 4000 is 65% faster than the 3000. But the more filters and full HD tracks you're trying to composite or render at once, the more a dedicated GPU will help. So it sounds like if you're not doing anything too fancy, the mini should be great.

So if you're going for simple video editing (I work for a church; we do simple video interviews without a lot of effects or compositing), I'm looking at the quad-core i7 mac mini as a sweet little machine. Especially if you add the Fusion drive to it, getting the OS and FCPX program files onto the SSD part of the drive. And crucial is selling a 16GB (8GB x 2) memory upgrade for the mini for $81.00 -- so don't buy your RAM upgrade from Apple if you don't mind installing it yourself.

Those are my thoughts...

If you are going to need to burn either, CD's or DVD's, guess what?

Both the new Mac Mini and iMac's have no internal Optical Drives.

The MacPro's still do, but that might go South when they up-date it.

Just thought I would pass on the info.

Russ A

ddangerous wrote:

You reckon the i7 2,3 with 8 GB of RAM can handle that?

My guess is that it would. But here's what I'd do if I were you:

Go into an Apple store. Use a few of their stock movie HD files to build a multicam project on the Mini. Test it for playing in real time – add titles, effects, whatever. Export it and note how long it takes. Do the same thing on a MBPr.You'll then have a decent idea of the high/low performance range and whether it's acceptable.

One day this summer while I waited for a repair to be done, I did a similar exercise – comparing 5 different machines – including the base MP model, the MBA, iMac, and two MBPs. Very interesting. (The MBPr "won" that speed test.)

Russ

My son is using an older mac mini that I updated to 8G of RAM. No problems. Of course he is doing pretty simple stuff. For consumer type editing the new mini would be great. I use an i5 iMac with 8G and it works great. I'm sure more memory would be better...

Would anyone's thoughts change with the following Mini configuration:

• 16 gigs RAM
• Fusion drive with 3 TB
• 2.6 Ghtz processor

I don't need blink speed processing power, however, I don't want to make a pot of coffee either.

I will use the Mini for Motion Graphics as well as a host of plugins and animation.

mmmmmmmmmm, coffee......

Russ - hilarious day many years ago, a couple of friends from Disney Productions Services were all at a Apple Store in Orlando, and somehow I ended up getting three Apple Store employees, myself, and my two friends all on two different Mac Pro's, several different MBP's and even a few Macbooks and i had loaded each one with some type of Motion template (unredered) and set it into a FCP timeline about seven times. By the time I had lined everything up, a crowd had grown, like I was some kind of street performer, and all these customers were curious at what was going on and some of course were simply waiting to get on one of the machines! It was crazy! I was shouting to everyone, "OK - wait, all at once we have to hit render at the exact same time!" and finally each machine was off and running and we were timing the results - each person would eventually yell, "mine's done!" and I was keeping track of which model completed the job in how much time...

Your story reminds me of that! Sometimes my friends from Disney still mention that escapade... it was funny. how did we ever get away with that stuff back then, I have no idea... I think I was trying to figure out how much faster a dual quad core was from a quad core... it was along time ago!

Great story…one that I can't come close to topping.

But I will tell you that I did attract a mini gathering of Apple Store employees who were extremely interested in the results of my timed trials. And a long debate among them ensued to explain various unexpected results.

Russ

did you say that in some of your results the MBP fared better than anticipated? My new MBP Retina has much faster buss speed than my Mac Pro, probably due to the 1600Mhz RAM? who knows, but I am impressed with it so far. I haven't really done any serious editing with it yet though.

In my editing geek circles i was almost surprised at how many friends didn't see the value of the Mac Pro when I was worried about it's fate a year ago. Even though the last refresh was more of the extention of it's life rather than a update in features, I still maintain that a XEON Quad Core is not the same as a i7 Quad Core processor - and how hard is that to figure out when you look at the processing tray on a Mac Pro compared to the thin processor on the portable versions.

Regardless, i admit that the laptops are amazingly fast for laptops! I'm very close to considering not shipping my Mac Pro / SAS RAID setup to Hawai'i next year! I can see that the MBP and a thunderbolt RAID may just be able to turn a big job like the Ironman around (almost) as quickly as my Mac Pro setup... it's getting close.

If the Mac Pro gets a real update, then that all changes though! Can you imagine a Mac Pro with thunderbolt, 1600MHz RAM and 16-cores, (and maybe even USB3)? It would be a very quick machine, for sure.

Also see this.

Russ

Thank you Russ