[ Update: On March 19, 2019, Apple released updates to both 21.5″ and 27″ iMacs. These new systems feature improved CPU and GPU options, though the display and storage remain the same as earlier versions. I’ve reflected these new options in my recommendations below. ]
At their WWDC, in June, 2017, Apple announced and released new iMac computers, designed to meet the needs of professionals. These new systems sport a variety of very exciting features. However, if you are on a budget, how do you determine where to spend your money?
This article is designed to help you make more informed choices when you don’t have a lot of money to spend.
NOTE: I have not purchased any of these systems. My recommendations are based on past experience, current system specs and talking with informed individuals.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
If money is no object, buy the top of the line iMac. It will work great and you’ll have bragging rights over all the other systems.
But, if money IS an object, then you need to make trade-offs, balancing the performance you need with the money you have. However, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get a system today that can meet your editing needs for the next several years.
ALSO: Here are two other configuration articles you may find useful:
YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE IMAC PRO?
Holy smokes! What a system.
This review covers the iMac. Click here to read about the iMac Pro.
YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MAC PRO?
Given the latest iMac releases, there are very, very few reasons to purchase a Mac Pro right now; especially given its price. Keep in mind, however, that Apple has already announced they are working on a new, top-of-the-line Mac Pro which will ship sometime in 2019.
Given what Apple has announced for the iMac Pro, however, that upcoming Mac Pro will need to be a true screamer to compete. I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple creates – but, as I mentioned earlier, I still need to pay my bills today.
And that leads us directly to the latest updates to the iMac.
WHAT SIZE SCREEN?
Both Final Cut Pro X and Premiere interfaces work best on larger screens. This is not to say they work poorly on smaller screens, but both of these display a LOT of elements on screen. More screen room is MUCH better.
I recommend a 27″ display. Plus, all the new 27″ iMacs now share the same 5K Retina Display.
NOTE: One of my iMacs is an older 5K iMac. I’ve discovered, that while seeing a 5K image is nice, the on-screen text is often very hard to read. So I’ve lowered the screen resolution using System Preferences to make the text larger. I prefer to easily read the text to seeing every pixel in my image.
However, if the purpose of the new system is video compression, you don’t need the bigger screen size. In which case, you can save money and improve performance with a 21″ system.
NOTE: Both H.264 and the up-coming H.265 video codecs are hardware-accelerated in all the new hardware. While this won’t help when transcoding into ProRes, hardware-acceleration will significantly speed compressing files for the web.
WHAT SPEED CPU?
UPDATE Intel’s latest 8th-gen and 9th-gen Core processors, including up to a 3.2GHz six-core 8th-gen Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz for the 21.5-inch 4K iMac and up to a 3.6GHz eight-core 9th-gen Core i9 with Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz for the 27-inch 5K iMac.
While CPU speed is important, it is not critical for video editing; remember, iMacs that were current as recently as last month, were easily able to edit almost all forms of SD, HD, and 4K media.
Any of the processors in any of the new iMacs will be fine for video or audio editing.
UPDATE: The choice in the 21.5″ iMac is between i5 and i7. The i7 is worth the money because of its support for multi-threading. The choice in the 27″ iMac is harder: between i5 and i9, because it’s a $500 differential. Unlike the i5, the i9 supports multithreading. If you are doing multicam, 4K or HDR editing, or lots of video compression, the i9 is worth the money.
HOW MUCH STORAGE?
I really like that Apple has put Fusion drives into all but two of their iMacs. I own two iMacs with Fusion drives and I remain very impressed with these systems. They are an excellent balance between the speed of an SSD with the storage capacity of spinning media.
Keep in mind that the SSD portion of a Fusion drive is only a part of the total storage. For example, the 1 TB Fusion uses a 32 GB SSD, while the 2 and 3 TB Fusion drives use a 128 GB SSD. The OS watches what you do and moves files onto the SSD based upon what you are using most. Which means that a Fusion drive works fastest with files you access over and over.
NOTE: Here is an updated article on storage speeds and media requirements that explains the load your storage system needs to carry.
If you want maximum performance AND you plan to store media on an external drive, get the 512 GB SSD. All the files in macOS will take less than 30 GB, leaving plenty of room for working files and immediate storage.
If you want an excellent balance between performance, price and capacity, stay with the 1 TB Fusion drive. Again, store media externally.
If you don’t plan to purchase external storage – and you will, you just don’t know it yet – get the 3 TB Fusion drive. (An extra TB for $100 makes this a better value than the 2 TB Fusion drive.)
One of my systems has a 3 TB Fusion drive. Currently, I’m using 600 GB of it. The rest is sitting around idle. When using external storage, you really don’t need lots of internal storage.
If you just want maximum performance from your storage, get the 1 TB SSD. It’s pricey, but it’s speed will make you giggle.
Apple notes: “For the best performance, iMac systems with 32GB or more of memory should be configured with a 2TB or larger Fusion Drive or all-SSD storage.”
NOTE: Apple’s marketing materials now define a terabyte as one trillion bytes. This means that when a disk is formatted, its storage capacity will be less than 1 TB because of the differences between how marketing and engineering calculate disk sizes.
WHICH GPU?
Configuring the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is now done when you pick the initial iMac, rather than as a build-to-order option within each iMac family. So, much though I would like to pick the mid-range system and add a high-end GPU into it, we no longer have that option.
Which is a shame. Because while we don’t need the high-end CPU system for most video editing, we would significantly benefit from the high-end 580 GPU in any system.
Both Final Cut and Premiere are increasingly using the GPU for most editing tasks, because the GPU is much faster than the CPU at rendering bitmapped images. Therefore, the best choice is the high-end GPU. The high-end GPU also includes 8 GB of video memory (VRAM).
However, the mid-range system with the Radeon Pro 575X is a perfectly adequate choice.
NOTE: The difference between the 575X and 580X is performance. The 575X has a peak performance of about 4.5 Teraflops, while the 580X supports up to 5.5 Tflops. Both will handle video just fine. All of the Radeon chips support OpenCL and Apple’s Metal and up-coming Metal 2 GPU computing API.
Here’s a link to learn more about Radeon’s GPU chips.
NOTE: Again, if you are principally doing video compression, the GPU speed is less important than the CPU speed. So, compressionists don’t need as high-performance a GPU as an editor.
UPDATE: When looking at GPU performance, use the specs for Metal or Metal II. OpenCL will not be supported going forward. Also, while eGPUs are attractive, I don’t see them, yet, as a big enough benefit for iMacs. eGPUs are principally designed for laptops.
HOW MUCH RAM?
Both Final Cut and Premiere will use as much RAM as you can afford.
Based on my tests with the 2016 MacBook Pro, I recommend a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, though, all my systems here have 32 GB. Again, if you have the money, max out the RAM. However, 32 GB of RAM will be sufficient for virtually all projects.
HOW MUCH SHOULD I SPEND?
You are going to be using this computer for four years. Spend what you can afford, but don’t be stingy in areas that matter: GPU and RAM.
All the base systems are fine, But, depending upon your needs, you can tweak the configurations to better match what you want the systems to do. All systems feature wireless mice and keyboards; though, in my office, I prefer my mice and keyboards wired.
NOTE: Apple has not yet delivered the Touch Bar on any stand-alone keyboards.
If it were my money and I was doing video editing on a budget, here’s what I would get:
Total: $2,499 (you’ll still need to spend additional money for 3rd-party RAM)
However, I wish that Apple made the Radeon 580X available on the mid-range unit.
If it were my money and I was doing mostly video compression, I’d get the high-end Mac mini. (This, in fact, is what I did personally.) Here’s an article that explains this in more detail.
As always, I’m interested in your opinions.
346 Responses to Configure a 2019 iMac for Video Editing [u]
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Leonard Levy says:
January 17, 2020 at 7:41 pm
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Larry says:
January 18, 2020 at 9:37 am
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Alex says:
February 26, 2020 at 11:21 pm
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Larry says:
February 27, 2020 at 8:48 am
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Warren says:
March 22, 2020 at 6:11 am
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warren says:
March 22, 2020 at 7:05 am
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Larry says:
March 22, 2020 at 8:03 am
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Laura Jimenez says:
May 19, 2020 at 3:44 am
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Larry says:
May 19, 2020 at 11:30 am
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Marcelo says:
July 20, 2020 at 5:55 am
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Larry says:
July 20, 2020 at 7:39 am
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Marcelo says:
July 20, 2020 at 9:06 am
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Larry says:
July 20, 2020 at 9:10 am
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Marcelo says:
July 20, 2020 at 9:33 am
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Darwin David Smith says:
August 13, 2020 at 6:20 pm
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Larry says:
August 13, 2020 at 8:03 pm
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Nick says:
June 30, 2021 at 12:17 am
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Larry says:
June 30, 2021 at 7:13 am
← Older CommentsI’m looking at getting a mid 2017 IMAC with
4..2GHz i7 Processor
Radeon Pro 580 GPU w/ 8GB VRAM
24GB RAM
1TB Storage
The price is only $1700
Will this be sufficient for me to feel comfortable edition 4K ( even if its proxy) and also running Resolve for either editing and or just color.
Leonard:
The speed and capacity of your external storage is equally important to editing 4K media, but in terms of a computer, this should be fine.
Larry
Hi,
I am looking to buy an iMac that would be capable of editing very short 4K video clips, mostly less than 1min, shot with my iPhone. I have a mid-2010 iMac now, and while it can play (choppily) 4k and import it into Premiere Elements, I can’t export an edited clip in 4K. I currently edit the clips with my iPhone, then export the finished clips to the computer, but it would be nice to be able to edit on the computer as well.
Is there a cheap older model iMac that would be able to handle editing just simple clips like that and export in 4k as well? I may also consider getting a better 4k camera at some point and edit clips shot with that one and perhaps also get Final Cut. However, all clips would be very short and have at most a few cuts, no special effects.
Would I be better off getting a lower end newer model iMac, or is there an older model that could handle 4k well but cost less? Don’t have much money to spend, so I was thinking of looking for a used Mac, but not sure what to look for.
Thanks for any advice!
Alex:
Any iMac suitable for playing HEVC video will do what you want. This means a 2015 iMac or later.
Larry
For those on a budget, I see the 2019 iMac 21.5″6-core i7, 256Gb SSD, 8Gb Ram and Radeon Pro Vega 20 – a much better buy, because all these iMac offer, the same 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports. Using Thunderbolt 3, add a second, larger monitor, an external Thunderbolt 3 external PCIe SSD case with Up to 2400MB/s write speeds NVMe – PCIe 3.1 x4. And though the 21.5″ is not user upgradable – yet it still can be upgraded. The 8 Gb of Ram should be replaced ASAP with 2 (16Mb chips) this can be done for about 120 bucks giving you a total of 32 Mb. At the same time, remove the 256Gb SSD which is NVMe – PCIe 3.1 x4 if you can. All for less then 500 bucks. Also note, the benchmarks of these two options, which are how Apple sells them (the 6-core i7 with Radeon Pro Vega 20) compared to the (6-core i5 the Radeon Pro 580x found on the 27″). The i7 beats the i5 and the Vega 20 is only marginally slower then the 580x. So in the end, the 21.5″ iMac 2019 configured with an i7 and Vega 20 GPU – seems like a winner to me. Cn anyone explain how wrong I maybe?
Use one port to add a larger display than the 21.5″ and the other port for an external SSD drive. And you can do this still on a budget. Amazon sells a
21.5″ iMac 2019 with 6-core i7, 8Gb Ram (replace later with 2-16Gb), 256 Gb SSD (I believe is a NVMe – PCIe 3.1 x4 and can later be replaced) and last the Radeon Pro Vega 20) — thinking this would be budget minded video editing joy of a machine. Consider all iMacs have the Thunderbolt 3 ports, 1) to add a larger monitor and 2) for an properly spec’d Thunderbolt external enclosure for (NVMe – PCIe 3.1 x4 SDD) one that allowing the closest to 40Gbps (not a USB 3.1 rated SATA SDD which peaks at 6Gbps).
WHY: Well the benchmarks for:
3.2GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, on the 21.5″ 2019
— BEAT —
3.7GHz 6-core 9th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, on the 27″ 2019
and the GPU benchmarks for:
Radeon Pro 580X with 8GB of GDDR5 memory in the 27″ 2019
— ONLY MARGINALLY BEAT —
Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory in the 21.5″ 2019
$3,204 CND for i5 580X vs $2,779 for i7 Vega 20
a $425 dollar difference that buys you the 32Gb Upgrade Ram (2- 16Mb for 107), an Thunderbolt 3 external enclosure for NVMe – PCIe 3.1 x4 SSD so its super fast at 40Gbps (500Gb cost about 120 and the case costs 130) est, 350 CND.
And you have a 21.5″ i7, 32Gb Ram, Radeon Pro Vega 20, 256Gb SSD (NVMe – PCIe 3.1 x4 internal with initial order) then Thunderbolt 3 port 1 you attach a second larger monitor then the 21.5″ and Thunderbolt 3 port 2 you attach the (TREBLEET Thunderbolt 3 SSD Enclosure,Thunderbolt3 to NVME M.2 2280 Hard Drive Case from amazon 130$) with the (Sabrent 512GB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-512 like 17 on amazon) and you have a total of 756Gb SSD almost a full gig.
And still save. Since you end up with more ram and more storage SSD space…
But has anyone done this?
Warren:
A few notes.
* The BIG!!! problem with upgrading a 21.5″ iMac after purchase is that it is NOT easy. It requires specialized tools, experience and patience. I have a cracked screen from a failed upgrade to show for it. I strongly recommend getting the RAM you need when you purchase, the risk of damage to your gear doing an upgrade is not worth it. (This is one reason I prefer 27″ iMac, RAM is easy to upgrade.)
* You can attached up to six devices to the same Thunderbolt port with no slowdowns.
* You don’t get the full 40 Gbps (5 GB/sec) bandwidth for data transfers via Thunderbolt. A more realistic number is around 2.5 GB/sec.
* 750 GB is not a lot of storage when media is involved. I would still recommend investing in spinning media storage for the capacity, and use NVMe for active projects.
Larry
This post gives good ideas on how professionals from the audiovisual sector should search for the right equipment. Do you have any tips on how to choose new Apple products in 2020?
Laura:
My recommendations have not changed.
Larry
Hi Larry! Thanks for the information!
I’m on a budget and thinking about buying this editing station:
iMac Intel® Core™ i5, 8GB, 1TB, 21,5″ screen, Radeon Pro 560X
I don’t deal with 3d, just occasional 4k footage on proxy, and I my exporting schedule is not that tight, although my projects are relatively big, like 15-20 min wedding videos.
Would that be enough to work with? Thank you very much!
Marcelo:
My only concern about your system is the RAM. 8 GB is not really enough for 4K. I’d spend the money and get 16 GB. The rest is fine for a budget system.
Larry
Thank you for the feedback!
Do you think the new MacMini with this specifications below would be a better option?
3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz)
8GB 2666MHz DDR4
Intel UHD Graphics 630
512GB SSD storage
Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet using RJ-45 connector)
I would put 16gb RAM later on. My main concern is with the video card.
Thank you!
Marcelo:
With the Mac mini:
* The CPU is better
* The RAM still needs to be 16 GB
* The GPU is not as fast/good
* The storage is more limited
* You need to buy a monitor
Larry
Thanks! It is a shame the Mac Mini does not have a better graphics card, overall is a pretty solid machine!
Best regards!
Hi Larry,
I have a 27-inch 2019 iMac(Mojave)3.77 GHz Intel Core i5
16GB 2667MHz DDR4 Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB
2TB Storage Fusion Drive
Will I have any issues running DaVinci Resolve 16.2.5 Fusion or any of the other Resolve options?
Regards, Darwin
Darwin:
You should be fine. The only trade-off between your system and a latest-and-greatest state-of-the-art system is speed, not quality. Playback and editing will be fine, rendering and exporting may take a bit longer, but in most cases, unless you use a stopwatch, you probably wouldn’t notice.
Larry.
Hi Larry,
I would like to get started working with FCPX editing clips in 1080p and 4K shoot with the iPhone and GoPro. Whilst this will be nowhere near professional work, the average video will be about 10min. incl. some effects.
I have the following system and would appreciate your opinion if I will be able to work with it:
iMac 27-inch, Late 2015
3.3GHz quad core i5
16GB RAM
2TB Fusion Drive
AMD Radeon R9 M395 with 2GB
The alternative would be replacing it with a used 2017 or 2019 model since I am not able to afford a new $2500 iMac.
As a side condition, I would need to keep 3 operating systems running on it (Windows, Mojave for 32Bit programs which I still need, and Catalina or later to run FCPX). Therefore, a Silicon iMac is no option for me.
Regards, Nick
Nick:
This is a great system to get started with. Buying something newer will buy more speed, but not higher quality.
Larry