Final Cut Pro on an iMac

February 27, 2009 7:00 PM

Generally speaking, how well would Final Cut Studio run on a hypothetical quad core iMac?
posted by mpls2 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

It runs very well, a lot of people have built hackintoshes with the Q6600 and have posted their impressions.
posted by wongcorgi at 7:15 PM on February 27

Runs fine on mine (that's what I bought it for).
posted by unSane at 7:47 PM on February 27

I mean it runs fine on my dual core iMac. It would run finer on a quad core!
posted by unSane at 7:48 PM on February 27

I'm on a late 2006 iMac (the white acrylic model) with a Core 2 Duo and it's very speedy - on a quad core you'd be blazing (with appropriately matched RAM and a decent graphics card).

Be careful with the iMacs for Final Cut though - you probably need multiple FireWire inputs/outputs, and the iMacs just don't have enough. I made that mistake and regret it all the time!
posted by cvp at 9:31 PM on February 27

Absolutely fine. For awhile , fcp couldn't even take full advantage of the eight cores, so there wasn't reason enough to go beyond a four core.
posted by history is a weapon at 11:23 PM on February 27

Runs fine.
posted by filmgeek at 3:14 AM on February 28

I just set up Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 on an 8-core Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. No empirical tests, but it's obviously many orders of magnitude faster than the dual G5 that this Mac Pro is replacing, particularly when it comes to any of the video encoding tasks. The editor who was getting this new tower could barely contain his glee as he launched Final Cut Pro to work on one of his projects.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 7:16 AM on February 28

I used to run FCP 6 on a Core 2 Duo (I don't remember the exact specs, but the iMac would be about a year and half old today).

It's not so much the processor speed you should be concerned about, unless you plan on doing lots of encoding, it's the amount of RAM.

If you plan on editing HD material I would suggest at least 4GB. If you are using this for something a little more complex, such as greenscreen keying and compositing, you might as well jump up to a Mac Pro at that point as it is more configurable and probably cheaper as you can add your own hardware instead relying on Apple's ridiculous mark up.
posted by helios410 at 8:26 AM on February 28