Late 2015 near to maxed out perfectly fine for FCPX?

[czerney]

I was holding out for a new iMac to be released last month.

My question - is a Late 2015 model with an i7, 395x graphics and an SSD going to be perfectly fine for editing with FCPX with?

My most intensive use case will be multicam editing primarily 1080p content with 3 x video camera angles plus 4-6 audio channels at the same time. Everything else I do will be pretty sedentary browsing, website creation, no gaming although there's a chance I'd install SC2.

If I were to pull the trigger on one will I be disappointed with the performance doing this type of stuff? ie is there anything this model lacks or struggles with that FCPX users have been hanging out for?

I might move to 4K video as well but not at all likely for at least a couple more years at best.

 

[BeechFlyer]

That kind of iMac will make a very nice platform for three or four 1080p angles and several audio tracks. Make sure the SSD is large enough to store all the files you need for a given project. I do this kind of editing on an 8-year-old Mac Pro (3,1) with conventional hard drives and it's not bad - your iMac will be a great setup!

Once you get to 4K, you can use proxy files if you don't like the editing performance with the 4K files - then render the final project in 4K.

 

[DavidDoyle]

I edit 3 camera shoots with a 2012 (Ivy Bridge) rMBP just fine, so I'd imagine a late 2015 iMac would be excellent. You'd have a fast GPU and the very fast SSD in those iMac's. Oh and make sure

*If* editing was a problem the first place to look would be the codec of your source material - FCPX can benefit from transcoding of some file types to ProRes but I use MXF format just fine without transcoding. Then if still an issue you can switch to proxy media as per BeechFlyer's suggestion.

In terms of storage you might like to consider external storage rather than using internal. That is a question best known by yourself in terms of number of shoots/projects you wan't to keep nearline. Certainly i would advise having some kind of ingestion/backup routine in place to secure your footage.

Oh - and are you looking at 21" or 27"? Note that that 21" Imac memory cannot be upgraded - I would suggest you're wanting 16 GB.

 

[Dae]

We bought a maxed out 2015 iMac for FCPX and DaVinci Resolve a month ago and we're very happy with the purchase. We mostly edit raw 4K footage from DJI Inspire.

 

[czerney]

Thanks for the replies all, yep I was looking at least 16Gb, even 8gb is fine and I can buy extra ram and upgrade. I've noticed a couple of near to fully spec'd 27" late 2015 models going on ebay for around $3-3.5KAUD of late.