Final Cut Express and AVCHD on Mac mini?

[petep]

Does anyone have experience using Final Cut Express (FCE) with AVCHD files on a Mac mini? Editing AVCHD is CPU intensive and Core 2 Duo instead of i5 on the mini is disappointing. But in practice, is the performance acceptable? I don't do large projects.

The Mac Pro is out of my price range. And I don't want an all-in-one iMac.

 

[Hellhammer]

AVCHD is extremely hard format to edit (so big and high-quality I guess) thus it's encoded to format that FCP can edit when you import it to FCP. Encoding might take awhile if it's big film but after that, the editing should be fairly smooth unless you're doing something intensive

 

[chrismacguy]

The Mac Mini should be fine for what you want, I do a similar workload on my now nearly 2-year old MacBook which has less performance than the new Minis, and it handles it just fine, the only thing Id say is make sure to boost the RAM to at least 4GB as Final Cut likes having plenty of room to breathe.

 

[indg]

i concur with chrismacguy. if you're going to do any sort of HD editing (720p/24fps or higher) you may want to get a fast external FW800 drive since AVCHD uses high bitrates. when rendering your cpu will be the bottleneck, but during editing, you don't want to be waiting for the hdd.

 

[iGrant]

I have an AVCHD camcorder that was given to me when my son was born and I found it near impossible to get the video off in any respectable time frame. Even with Final Cut Express it took FOREVER, but I have a Mac Mini Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo, so that might make a huge difference.

I got the Turbo.264 HD and I can pull all my 1080 HD video and convert to H.264 1080P at about a 3rd of real time on that Mac Mini which I'm very happy with. From there I can convert the video to whatever format I want.

-iGrant

 

[chrismacguy]

I have an AVCHD camcorder that was given to me when my son was born and I found it near impossible to get the video off in any respectable time frame. Even with Final Cut Express it took FOREVER, but I have a Mac Mini Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo, so that might make a huge difference.

The Core 2 Duo works much better than your Core Duo, and also runs at a much higher clockspeed, so that will make a big difference (its about 100% faster overall). It should also be noted that you may not have had enough RAM for FCE as it really needs 2GB and certainly likes 4+GB to operate correctly.