Best way to setup FCPX on iMac 2011 i7

Hi All

Just looking for a quick bit of advise on the best way to setup FCPX on my 2011 i7 iMac.

I'm pretty new to Apple OSX and previously used PP CS5 and a custom built Windows 7 box to edit my HD footage. I spent a long time looking into how to setup scratch disk's and also built a RAID 0 with a couple of WD Hard drive to boot from. Once I had spent some time setting it all up I was very pleased with the result's (no lag etc)..

So question is, how do I go about setting up the iMac I'm now using as I seem to be running into issue's when editing and scrubbing through video.

Is it worth converting my H264 to something more CPU friendly or checking the "Create optimized media" when importing (crashed the program last time I tried that).

Hardware specifications and source material inflation.
3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
12 GB 1333MHz DDR3
OS X 10.8.2 (12C60)
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB
27-inch (2560 x 1440)
Hard Drive - ST31000528AS Media

HD Media - 720p 60 fps / .mp4 - H264

Any help would be much appreciated indeed

Xray

Your iMac is perfect for working with FCP10.

If you are experiencing slowdowns or lags when scrubbing and editing:

1. Do NOT keep the original media you are editing with, nor your FCP10 Events or Projects on your iMac's startup drive. Put them on a fast external FireWire 800 or TB drive.

2. Disable Background Rendering. This is a fairly useless feature unless you stop editing every five minutes to grab some coffee (or anything else). While you are editing you mostly won't need to render anyway, FCP10 has excellent RT playback capabilities.

3. Although many of us successfully edit H.264 natively, it is a very demanding editing format for any system. So yes create Optimized media when you are having any problems using this format.

There are other things you can do to maximize your editing performance, but this will get you started. It would also help if you would provide more details about the issues you are having. Then we can give more specific advice.

Thanks for the help with this, seems like I need to run this pretty similar to PP-CS5 and store my media on a separate drive. I have a Freedom drive I run Time Machine with at present and I think they do a TB adaptor for that.

One question; If I was to fit a Solid State and boot from that and then store all my media on the internal SATA would that of similar performance?

Thanks for the help so far..

Xray

Hi Xray,

Yes putting an SSD drive inside as your system drive and using the SATA drive as your FCP10 work drive would certainly make a difference.

I put a 120GB OWC 6G SSD into my iMac which is exactly the same as yours and it made a HUGE difference, not just in editing, but in everything.

It was a little scary taking my iMac apart, but I bought the kit from OWC with all the tools and watched their instructional video about five times before I installed the drive, then followed it step by step as I was upgrading.

Unbelievably fast, makes using any other computer painful. All of your basic programs like iTunes or Chrome are opened by the time you're done clicking, FCPX still takes some time to open, but it's much much faster.

Thanks for the update, I had a quick google and found this following link: eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDAP116K240/

I take it this is the kit your are referring to? Is there a link to the upgrade video that also go's through the process of reloading the OS onto the SSD Drive?

Thanks in advance for the info..

Xray