2GB or 4GB of RAM for Final Cut Express?

[dannyboxer]

Hello. I'm going to buy a top of the range 24" 3.06Ghz iMac soon.

I will buy Final Cut Express to edit high definition video footage from my high definition camcorder.

Will 4GB of RAM make it smother and quicker whilst editing and watching high definition video?

Should I buy the RAM from Apple or somewhere else?

 

[Courtaj]

You might want to try posting this over in the Digital Video forum: https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/80/

Andrew.

 

[Icaras]

DO NOT get RAM from Apple. Ever. You can try Crucial, which, in my experience and many others that I've seen, offers very cheap and reliable memory options. I've gotten all my Mac memory from Crucial and I have never had a problem. In fact I just picked up 4 gigs for a mere $67 recently for my DDR2 equipped Macbook Pro (and im probably sure you can find prices even lower than that). It was definitely the best deal I've ever had on RAM.

That said, questions like these always seem to baffle me. If you're already set on dishing out the money for the top of the line model, why would something like $60 something dollars be so trivial?

And since you can't even go more than 4 gigs, it makes it even less of a big deal.

So on all Macs except for the Mac Pro, regardless of whether you need to run big production apps or not, and considering cheap RAM prices, my simple answer always is, why not?

 

[dannyboxer]

Yeah OK I will buy the iMac with 2GB of RAM and then later on buy some more RAM to make it 4GB of RAM. That way I won't be spending a ton of money at the same time.