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Nuttz565

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2012
9
3
Hey guys, so after being a long time PC user I decided to jump ship and try out a Mac. I went ahead and purchased a used mid 2011 iMac 27, Core i5, 2.7ghz, 8gb ram and AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB. So I do a lot of video editing and currently I am using the latest Final Cut Pro X. My camcorder uses .MTS files and since FCP does not natively support these I convert them to a Quicktime file before I import them. Now the issue Im having is Im constantly getting the "beach ball" popping up, my video in the timeline will at time go green and its just very sluggish overall. I know I don't have the best specs but I guess I was hoping for a little better performance. Will upgrading the ram to 16gb help with this? is it possible to upgrade my video card in the mid 2011's? Thanks in advance for the help
 

Nyy8

macrumors 6502a
Jun 12, 2011
523
179
New England
Hi,

I'm assuming that these files are HD? How big are these files? You can find this out by right clicking "Get Info" on the file itself. and it will say the size.

When you do edit these videos, do you have any other programs open?
 

Nuttz565

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2012
9
3
All the files are 1920x1080, most are 1-3 minutes in length and vary in size from 80-400 mb in size. I have tried having all other programs closed while running FCP. On a similar setup on my PC (actually my PC had only 4gb ram) I never had any issues editing the files. Im using a free program called "Smart Converter" which converts the files into a quicktime format, curious if there is a preferred file format for FCP?
 

yjchua95

macrumors 604
Apr 23, 2011
6,725
233
GVA, KUL, MEL (current), ZQN
Hey guys, so after being a long time PC user I decided to jump ship and try out a Mac. I went ahead and purchased a used mid 2011 iMac 27, Core i5, 2.7ghz, 8gb ram and AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB. So I do a lot of video editing and currently I am using the latest Final Cut Pro X. My camcorder uses .MTS files and since FCP does not natively support these I convert them to a Quicktime file before I import them. Now the issue Im having is Im constantly getting the "beach ball" popping up, my video in the timeline will at time go green and its just very sluggish overall. I know I don't have the best specs but I guess I was hoping for a little better performance. Will upgrading the ram to 16gb help with this? is it possible to upgrade my video card in the mid 2011's? Thanks in advance for the help

I think an SSD would be more important.
 

Htin

macrumors regular
Mar 6, 2013
162
2
ram upgrade won't do much for you mate... ssd upgrade would be nice provided he can get someone to do it.
 
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