Do I need 4K and will my 2012 imac even work with it?

If I had a choice between two camera of comparable quality and features – one of which was HD and the other UHD I would invest in the higher res camera (assuming it didn't break my budget). Two reasons: 1) more pixels mean more framing flexibility; I can zoom in crop, reposition for additional visual interest; 2) "future-proofing" footage…that is, giving me the ability to use this footage in future projects when 4K is the new norm or output a 4K version of today's project in the future without the quality hit it would take by up-scaling an HD version to UHD.

Also, people who know far more about camera than I'll ever know assert that 1080 that is re-sized from 4K is generally of higher quality than material that was shot in 1080.

Hopefully others will chime in with their thoughts on this,

Russ

edit: Yes, your 27" 2012 iMac will be OK – not fabulous, but OK.

1 GB VRAM is the minimum recommendation for FCP.

In addition to Russ's excellent advice: be sure to work with a fast external drive.

If you can afford a 4K camera you are future proofing you work as per Russ' advice.

I run a G7 and it's only shortcoming is NO headphone jack, it does support external mic.

GH4 does have a headphone jack and external mic.

Both will work OK with 4K in FCP X specs permitting.

Al

a) your Mac will; read my specs: 30% of yours and happily handling 4k

b) 4k, here some non-scientific test; Hamlet, stagelight, 3-cam multicam;

the schools own hmc70: shoulder mounted 'beast' to its time, 3CCD; fullHD50i, 17mbps and the automatic overwhelmed by dynamics.. yeah, you should fly manually under such light conditions, but the cams operator had never touched that dial ... noise in the darks… 'random' colors; close ups were fine ...

my tiny sports-cam, hc v707 (US# 700); fullHD, 50p, 28mbps - another unmanned camera this evening, aside framing a fully accepatable pic; color needs some correction in post ..

and on the left side of stage, my beast&beauty (the cam! not the girl ...)

This is recorded in 4k/25p, 100mbps, and my FCPX project is set to 1080/25, so cam pix downsampled

click pics for full-size, and in this case: just notice detail in cloth, skin tones etc etc ...

and me lazy: in full auto mode too .... 😉well, not 100% auto .... 90% ...

I dare to say: 4k cams are from the ground constructed for a new quality; as many say: not a delivery format for quiet a while but and excellent source material for 'standard HiDef' (have read that expression lately ... HighDef is meanwhile 'standard' LOL)

When you add a bit of pixie-dust (sharpen, curves) to those video-screengrabs (!!), pic quality is incredible...

(click to enlarge)

No doubt, if budget allows it, jump to 4k; consider a device with 4:2:2 at hdmi; in 1-2years you could apply a Ninja recorder to grab the last grain of quality out of your pics ..... Your Mac needs only a few ext. usb3 drives, mechanically or SSDs

cedar23 wrote:

… does this mean that …

No.

First line in my lengthy reply:

Your actual Mac handles 4k fine, if, if you use at last one additional, external drive for the Events/'source' files ...

That's all the 'magic' handling 4k ... on a Mac.

At fcp.co, other MacMini Users report, they handle 4k, like me, on that tiny Tubberware Box = a Mini is LESS powerful than your actuall Mac!

I don't say, recommended for daily, on the minute professional, commercial use.

If I would get paid for my editing, I would buy me a 5k iMac ... 😉

… and an external, TB-connected überRaid ... LOL

cedar23 wrote:

....Are you saying that for instance an external SSD drive would help with 4K rather than importing the source file onto the internal drive. Would a 7200 USB3 be ok as I already have one.....

in short: Yes. And yes.

On a normal day, sitting at your Mac…

• your system is busy - and it uses the internal drive to read and write data, some are invisible (swaps) but >1GBs

• your app(s) is busy (with itself,e.g. managing/indexing your Events) - and they use the internal drive to read and write data

• FCPX is busy read/write the Project

• FCPX is busy generating&reading all sorts of cached data, or 'stuff' like audio waveforms

• finally, FCPX has a high demand of a constant streams of data video - huge streams, they scale by used formats

on a very reduced level of engineering we observe 5 sorts of data-streams - all from and to one drive? ; and the one stream with 4k is huge, while watching a simple disssolve you have TWO streams of 4k; creating a compound with 3 clips as a cut-away and watching it asks for four simultanous delivered streams.... are you still convinced, a single internal drive (you play music while editing? check emails? download pics from the cloud....), A Fusion Drive is capable to deliver and receive/write this amount of bits'n bytes?

The speed-tolol with most renommeé is Black Magic Speed Test; aside speed it lists 'best practice values for diff. video formts/codecs'.

This is speed of one of my average usb3 drives:

<click to enlarge>

"Will it work" claims, its good for NTSC/PAL, but even 720/30p could create stutter… (real-life performance differs: this drive handles 1080/50p fine...

Next, my Raido-0:

twice the speed (reading) ... the green checkmarks go up to 1080/60i (real life higher...

an ext.SSD, here my small Samsung SSD performs as...

almost beyond scale, >400mbps

all tests performed direct usb3-connected to MacMini

If you don't trust my very rural experience, listen to expert Larry Jordan

https://larryjordan.com/articles/fcp-x-v-10-1-media-management-collection/?utm_s ource=Larry%2527s%20Newsletter%20-%20140…

(a list to several articles explaining this issue)

or the other usual supects, some participating here on this board

Tom Wolsky http://www.fcpxbook.com/articles/managed-and-external-media.html

Ben Balser (oops, just realizing my link list is old.... )

plus: you need tons of GBs for storing clones of your SDcards, finished play-out projects, 'media' in general, music, graphics, animations, photos, movies............. and of course: backups....

Your question why you should need an external drive, could be answered:

you're right, one is by far not enough, should be at last three extHDD..... 😉

tl;dr:

rule of thumb: one 'platter*' per 'stream**' = flawless handling even of 4k-Multicam on a tiny, old MacMini ....

* platter=individual media; not a partitioned drive; or SSD, allthough no mechanical platters involved

** stream=sources, but the project itself counts as a 'stream' too