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Gnoop2019

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 8, 2019
2
0
To edit family videos on imovie (making montages and stuff) without having lag. Once edited it will be uploaded to external hard drive so no uneccessary videos taking up space. The computer will mostly be for this and web surfing. Thanks

Specs are

I5
256ssd
16gb ram
 
No
[doublepost=1552094316][/doublepost]There will be "lag" as you call it while video files render. How much depends on many factors including the size of the files and the apps that you use but an i5 with those basic specs will take time.

Whether the time involved is acceptable to you is not something that any of us can answer.

An i7 will perform better as will the Radeon 580 GPU. 250GB SSD may or may not be big enough but your boot drive needs to be big enough for your System, Applications plus all active work files. With a drive that small, plan on doing a lot of housekeeping as you swap files in and out. I'm more comfortable with larger storage onboard.

Plan on having an external drive for storage of all non-active files. You can store your iTunes library on it, too through symbolic links. This is even easier under Mojave. USB-C is fast enough for this. You can get a 2TB SSD plus a USB-C dock for $300 give or take.
 
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Exactly there will always be lag while the files render. As far as those specs for what you're looking to do, they're more than enough.
 
Well it is a little hard to say exactly as the first i5's came out ten years ago so a lot will depend on model and operating system. Always helps if you provide that info.

For mine suggest at least a late 2012 model with USB3 and an external SSD.
 
To edit family videos on imovie (making montages and stuff) without having lag...
Specs are

I5
256ssd
16gb ram

Even though iMovie is very fast, if you are shooting 4k H264 there may be some timeline lag. It depends on the exact flavor of H264. If the machine is 2017 or later, it probably has the Intel "Kaby Lake" CPU which has an improved version of Quick Sync. FCPX, DaVinci Resolve and (I think) iMovie use this for playback; Adobe Premiere does not.

iMovie does not apparently do "background rendering" like FCPX can, nor does it support proxy files. However for casual editing of modest amounts of single-camera 4k H264 material on a relatively new Mac, you may not need those.

If you are shooting iPhone video using 4k HEVC (aka H265) that can be different. Do not shoot any HEVC material on an iPhone if you plan on editing this -- unless you first test that workflow. Otherwise it might be too sluggish to edit.
 
Exporting a video will always require time to process as the video is transcoded regardless of specs. CPU and tech it has within that the software can utilize along with the specs of the output file (resolution, bit rate, color depth, FPS, codec, quality of compression, etc) will determine that amount of time.

Typically when referencing "lag" while editing I'm referencing how smoothly you can scrub through the timeline/clips and how the software is running in general. When video editing I describe lag as the disconnect felt from the video editing app and usually accompanied by me saying "Is this thing even friggin' doing anything?!". Lol.

A general rule to video editing is to use dedicated graphics. It doesn't matter which GPU your computer has just as long as it has dedicated graphics so the video editing software can move GPU driven loads off the CPU.

Resolution, codec, color depth, compression profile, and/or frames per second combined or even individually of your imported media will directly effect performance.

Without dedicated graphics results will vary however modest clips that you are recording with non professional hardware will be perfectly fine. Here is a video I made really quick on my 13" MBP i5 (no dedicated graphics), these are 2 HEVC clips (rt709), one at 1080p30 the other at 4k30 encoded.


Scrubbing through both the HEVC 1080p is fine. However the HEVC 4k clip is a bit lagging. So in that case HEVC is fine and 4k would be fine but not HEVC encoded 4k. But that isn't always the case since it depends on the specific clip. I've used HEVC 4k from an iPhone without noticing a problem and that is likely due to the complexity of the HEVC used.

Thats an extreme too, iMovie hated those clips and fought me at every turn trying importing them. In the end I had to transcode them with handbrake h265, even then there were limitations. Considering that I would say you'll be mostly fine. If in doubt just get a Mac with dedicated GPU.
 
To edit family videos on imovie (making montages and stuff) without having lag. Once edited it will be uploaded to external hard drive so no uneccessary videos taking up space. The computer will mostly be for this
Again, you've picked a wimp of a machine for this. It will do the job but, depending on the quality of the video, might take forever to do so.
 
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