A friend is going to be producing some documentaries about a village in Kenya that he is working with. He is not a pro, but can do the basics. He is looking for a new setup to replace is aging MacBook Pro. Basically budget allows for the base 21" iMac:
2.5GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
1920 x 1080 resolution
4GB (two 2GB) memory
500GB hard drive1
AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB

My question is how vital a role does the GPU play in video editing? 512 mb video seems rather paltry compared to whats coming out these days. He will be using FCPX. He would be eventually adding more ram, but would start with the stock setup. Some of the video is HD, not sure if that makes a difference.


Thanks

HD will certainly make a difference as it contains at least twice the amount of data per frame as compared to standard video.

Will let others with better video background answer your GPU question.

I can't speak specifically on FCPX's use of the GPU with my limited knowledge of FCPX. Obviously a beefier GPU will help, but without knowing the details of what your friend wants to edit...hard to give you a concrete answer. It might be trial and error.

It's always a good idea to invest in RAM and drive space, depending on the amount of footage involved. Me personally, I have 2 redundant copies of all non-physical media (ie. video shot on cameras that use flash memory instead of tapes) and for your friend I would recommend a couple of external drives...one to edit off (so that you don't clog up your system drive with tons of HD footage) and a couple as backups.

In this case, I would back up the "camera masters" immediately after shooting and then do a daily backup of the editing drive to a separate backup drive. I've got a pretty established workflow for doing this sort of thing with FCP7, but I'd suggest kenstone.net for figuring out backups with FCPX.

Which camera will he be shooting with?

Not sure of the camera, its not pro stuff, but it is a modern HD video camera. He is involved with a charity group that looks after a medical facility as well as other needs for a small village in Kenya, so not a lot of money to throw at all top notch equipment.

He will just be editing together video of whats going on in this village and surrounding area in Kenya, along with voice over, and music added. Some light titling and that such I am sure, but nothing major, as he is not a pro at this, just knows the very basics.

If performance is a concern, iMovie might be a better choice under the circumstances.

If performance is a concern, iMovie might be a better choice under the circumstances.

For what he is doing, I dont think there will be any problem with an i5 iMac upgraded to 8 gigs of ram, running FCPX. My main question was how much of a difference does a GPU make when it comes to video editing. I was thinking it was more processor and ram and hard drive speed, but was not sure how much the GPU played into all that.

For what he is doing, I dont think there will be any problem with an i5 iMac upgraded to 8 gigs of ram, running FCPX. My main question was how much of a difference does a GPU make when it comes to video editing. I was thinking it was more processor and ram and hard drive speed, but was not sure how much the GPU played into all that.

According to Apple FCPX is GPU aware for background rending, so a GPU with more on board RAM will make a difference in those terms. But that being said it depends how much rendering he will actually be doing in his editing. Transitions, effects and text overlays all require rendering, so it really depends of how much of these will be in his work as to whether or not the performance boost would be significant to the overall rendering time and time to complete a given project.

Of more importance is that he not have his video files on the boot drive but a separate drive dedicated for video files (preferably RAID 0 array for the fastest throughput). The constant reading and writing of small bits of data to the boot drive works against the need to read & write large continuous video files and slows things down considerably.

Hope this helps.