Is this MacBook Pro good enough for video editing?

www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-macbook-pro-1...2.p?id=1219343246944

I'm a new to video editing and would like to know if this will be sufficient to actually edit a lot of clips (maybe 1 hours worth). I'll most likely be using a DSLR camera at 1080P.

Any help would be appreciated!

The computers good, but you should get a big, fast drive to go with it. If you keep the system slim, you might even manage on the system drive itself. Don't optimize the media.

Tom Wolsky wrote: Don't optimize the media.

Why shouldn't I? I thought it'd work faster with optimised video. Am i wrong?

You won't. Switch off rendering as well. Optimized makes huge files. You'll definitely need another drive if you want to optimize. Learn how to use the app before you need to use it for real.

If it's just because the space, I won't argue. Actually, I don't optimize media, I'm so lazy to do it.

To blacklabel036. I use old MacAir and old Mac mini and in terms of FCPX they work me good (not perfect but still)

Mm

I'll optimise the media, but not on ingest. I'll usually do it overnight early on in the project.

Supposedly the reason for its better performance which is really what you want. The downside is does take up a lot of storage. If you,were to do so you may want to consider extra storage, either for the optimised files, the original files, or both.

If the project is quite small you might be able to get away with internal storage.

I think my main concern was about the Iris Pro Graphics not being capable enough to handle some adequate editing.

Anyway, I'm definitely getting a bigger external hard drive. 256GB is nothing these days.

blacklabel036 wrote: I think my main concern was about the Iris Pro Graphics not being capable enough to handle some adequate editing.

Anyway, I'm definitely getting a bigger external hard drive. 256GB is nothing these days.

Tom is correct; you do not generally need to optimize media. There are a few cases if using highly-compressed codecs such as GoPro where optimization might make rapid JKL editing go a little faster, but it's usually not needed.

Contrary to popular belief many editing operations on H.264 are CPU-limited, not GPU or I/O-limited. This is obvious from inspecting CPU, GPU and I/O activity via iStat Menus or other utilities while editing. In short the more/faster CPU cores the better.

GPU acceleration can help certain effects but even these are often CPU-limited. The GPU cannot generally accelerate encoding or decoding of long GOP material like H.264 because the core algorithm is inherently sequential and not amenable to the type of parallelization GPUs offer. So GPU is not unimportant, but it's not all-important.

The laptop you mentioned is probably fine for editing 1080p video. I would suggest not getting a slow bus-powered USB 3 drive. Most of these are 5400 rpm and not that fast. One of the few 7200 rpm bus-powered drives (and the fastest I have tested) is the HGST Touro S: www.touropro.com/en/product/touro-s/ However it is "only" 1 TB so you may need more space.

Seagate probably has the fastest bus-powered USB 3 drive, the 4TB Backup Plus Fast. However it is internally RAID 0 which has pros and cons from a performance and reliability standpoint: www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/por...ackup-plus-fast-hdd/

There are many good USB and Thunderbolt AC-powered external drives made by G-Tech: www.g-technology.com/ , LaCie: www.laciestorage.com and other companies.

Remember whatever external drive you get must itself be backed up, including the computer SSD, to some other hard drive.