Is iMovie just like FCPX in terms of hardware needs?

[twobikes]

Good afternoon,

Completely new to the hackintosh community today. But 20+ years of Unix/Linux sysadmin experience behind me.

I need a new mac system with these goals:
1) general home use (email, web browsing, office tools, iPhoto)
2) Video editing. Currently I use iMovie for making video -- 5-10 minute movies, HD.
However I would be interested in upgrading to better software and was figuring on moving to Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) for price and familiarity.

My current system is a mid-2009 iMac 24" - core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM -- so I know that just about anything is going to feel like a huge step up.

Anyway, I have been reading all day and I'm really impressed and grateful for the amount of work that has gone into the buyer guides, documentation, and this forum.

BUT... as I do my homework I keep coming upon post after post that relates problems with using FCPX with the GTX 740 (and related) video cards which is in the buyers guides

So my questions

1) is iMovie going to have the same problems as FCPX with running on those video cards? They're both from apple, so I expect them to share some code, but I could be wrong.

2) Is the Radeon R9 280X still the recommended card for video editing with FCPX/iMovie? Are there cheaper alternatives?

3) Does that video card work fine with the other buyers guide hardware, or are there different MBD/CPU recommendations there?

(I have looked at the "Golden Build" forum, but none of those are newer than 12 months old)

Any help and pointers greatly appreciated.

ps: Just browsing the apple store and I notice that the recent iMac units all supply Nvidia GT755 M graphics (Fall 2013 version of iMac). And I would have thought that FCPX would work on those systems. This is confusing.

 

[pjjj]

I'm running FCPX with a pair of R9 280X cards. I haven't bothered to do benchmarks, but I can say it runs very nicely. Not that it was terribly slow on my old 2011 macbook pro, but it did bog down sometimes, and transcoding to optimized media seemed to take forever. It's much faster now. Just the other day I tried importing some 4K material (only a screencast... don't have a 4k camera) and FCPX was able to work with it just was well as regular hidef video.

 

[Abe Frohman]

I don't know how well this corollates with iMovie but according to this forum thread AMD cards are typically moderately faster than Nvidia cards when working in FCPX.

My 280X performs this render test in 29 seconds.

 

[pjjj]

I ran BruceX just the other day, out of curiousity. 19 seconds with dual 280X.

I also ran these tests, which are probably much more representative of typical FCPX performance with normal usage on HD content than BruceX's test on 5K export.

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/real-world-d300-vs-d500-vs-d700-fcpx-benchmarks.1701775/
http://hardware.forumsee.com/a/m/s/p12-21832-0445517--real-world-d300-d500-d700-fcpx-benchmarks.html

In tests 1-3, my times slightly beat the 4-core D300. On #2 Clouds, I got 2:00, which is a little faster than that minimum Mac Pro, but nowhere close to the high-end machines, like the 1:12 time reported for a 12-core D700 system!

My Prores export time was slow. So were some of the others, even on very fast machines. Maybe Compressor speeds it up?

 

[pjjj]

and yeah, sorry, that high end benchmarking is pretty much the opposite of iMovie....

2) Is the Radeon R9 280X still the recommended card for video editing with FCPX/iMovie? Are there cheaper alternatives?

On the (very long) BruceX forum thread, I saw a few people reporting pretty decent results with 270X cards.

Sadly, it seems nobody reports much about iMovie.