Which Mac to buy for Premiere Pro and Web Design?

[moonsharkdesign]

Hi

I am new to the forum as was not sure who to ask for quality advice, hopefully someone can help me out. I have a macbook pro currently and love it, however, I have since bought a Gopro 7, so instead of editing 1080 footage and being just about OK, 4k has completely battered my machine. I have used proxies and these are OK at about 1/2 quality when editing, but this is without any sort of effects so I feel it would be time for an upgrade.

This is what I have now:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9g6kkhqmq2wnbdt/Screen Shot 2018-09-29 at 11.14.39.png?dl=0

What should I be looking at for a better machine? I get I need a faster processor but if I am honest I am unsure which is right for me.

I use the following programmes a lot

1. Parallels with Visual Studio
2. Sketch
3. Photoshop
4. VS Code
5. Terminal for Grunt etc
6. Premiere Pro for editing holiday videos.

I have looked at the Apple store and seen you can get a quad or a dual-core processor, would I be best with the dual with 16gb or RAM?

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro

Or, would you pick the top one and then upgrade it again in the options, again, ensure the difference between 2.3 and upgrading to a 2.7 would be such a jump in speed and benefit me?

The other option is to keep my MacBook Pro and get an iMac, would these be a lot better for video editing? Again, unsure which option to choose, how much upgrading I should do as I do not want to spend another £1600 and find out that it is still struggling.

Any advice would be great. I would appreciate it.

 

[Trixster]

as I see it there´s two options. Since it seems your mbp works good for everything except video editing, one option is to keep your existing setup and just transcode the files you get from your gopro to a more editing friendly format, since the original footage is very hard on the cpu. Actually, you would probably need an imac or top of the line mbp to be able to edit that video smoothly anyway, without transcoding it.
So that´s option nr 2, get an imac or top of the line mbp. The amount of ram is not that important when working with "simple" video editing, the cpu is far more important, especially for some codecs where the gpu wont be able to help out.

So in my opinion you´re better of keeping your existing setup another year or two and just transcode the footage from your gopro before editing it.

 

[keysofanxiety]

This might be an unpopular choice for you but have you considered moving to FCPX? Honestly your machine is more than powerful enough for 4K, it's just that Premier Pro is so painfully unoptimised for macOS.

There's a video somewhere on YouTube where a user edited/exported the same 4K footage on a 13" rMBP (so nowhere near your model). The export took 5 minutes in FCPX and about 35 in Premier Pro.

I know it sounds like a huge deal to move and relearn something but I find FCPX to be very intuitive and honestly it runs like butter on macOS. Your mileage may vary, though I thought it worth mentioning so you don't have to fork out for a whole new machine.

 

[moonsharkdesign]

This might be an unpopular choice for you but have you considered moving to FCPX? Honestly your machine is more than powerful enough for 4K, it's just that Premier Pro is so painfully unoptimised for macOS.

There's a video somewhere on YouTube where a user edited/exported the same 4K footage on a 13" rMBP (so nowhere near your model). The export took 5 minutes in FCPX and about 35 in Premier Pro.

I know it sounds like a huge deal to move and relearn something but I find FCPX to be very intuitive and honestly it runs like butter on macOS. Your mileage may vary, though I thought it worth mentioning so you don't have to fork out for a whole new machine.

Hi, I am going to look at this now, seems like another good option. I only really do simple transitions from transition packs with music over the top, and only really doing it twice a year for hols, so this maybe a good option. Cheers

 

[keysofanxiety]

Hi, I am going to look at this now, seems like another good option. I only really do simple transitions from transition packs with music over the top, and only really doing it twice a year for hols, so this maybe a good option. Cheers

I think you’ll really like FCPX if that’s what you use it for. The magnetic timeline is great for doing stuff like that and it’s got some nice transitions in the application.