Hello Everyone , I have a Early 2011 MacBook Pro. Upgraded to 750gb hard drive and 8gb ram. It been good to for 4 year now.however, just recently I purchased a drone . While using iMovie to edit videos , everything is slow and choppy . Making video editing painful . Is there anything I can do, to not have this issue ? i cannot afford a new MacBook Pro at this moment . The 16gb ram one I want is close to $2000. I can not justify paying $1500 for a 8gb model as I don’t believe in the next 3-5 years the 8gb ram will be sufficient, especially for the money . Any recommendation on how to solved this video laggin is greatly approached . Thank you
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2011 MBP help please
- Thread starter s2000gtx
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13"? Upgrade the HDD to an SSD. If you've already got an SSD fitted then potentially the SATA cable is failing - common issue on those models.
If it's 15" or 17" then the graphics are likely to be on their way out.
If it's 15" or 17" then the graphics are likely to be on their way out.
If it’s 15 or 17 inch your graphics are Probably dying you have ltd options at that point as it’s pretty much game over and a new machine will be needed. If it the 13 inch then try repairing your disk in disk utility, if that doesn’t work a new HDD cable (£20 on Amazon) may well fix it.
It’s coming up for 7 years old that’s a damn good innings for any computer so you really need to think about how you are going to replace it when you need to, as it won’t last for ever.
It’s coming up for 7 years old that’s a damn good innings for any computer so you really need to think about how you are going to replace it when you need to, as it won’t last for ever.
As mentioned above, upgrade the internal platter-based hard drive to an SSD.
This will make A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE, particularly during video editing where data is being loaded/edited/re-written to disk.
Also, an important question:
Are the drone videos 4k?
If so, you might consider switching to Final Cut Pro X.
FCPx can create "proxies" for 4k video, which GREATLY speeds up the editing process.
When the editing is done, you then "output" to FULL 4k.
But again, the editing will be much more "fluid" using proxy 4k.
I suggest you visit YouTube and watch a few videos on how this works.
This will make A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE, particularly during video editing where data is being loaded/edited/re-written to disk.
Also, an important question:
Are the drone videos 4k?
If so, you might consider switching to Final Cut Pro X.
FCPx can create "proxies" for 4k video, which GREATLY speeds up the editing process.
When the editing is done, you then "output" to FULL 4k.
But again, the editing will be much more "fluid" using proxy 4k.
I suggest you visit YouTube and watch a few videos on how this works.
Last edited:
Thanks everyone for the reply . I already have ssd. Yes it’s a 13” 2011 MacBook Pro. I was thinking if the graphic card could be upgraded ? And I will look into final cut I don’t do much video editing but and never had a need to until now .
There are pretty much no upgrade options for graphics or cpu on most laptops short of massive gaming rigs. Your machine has inbuilt graphics on the cpu anyway.
OP:
Like Samuelsan said, the video card IS NOT upgradeable.
What you have now, is all you're going to have.
Pay attention to what I said regarding Final Cut Pro and proxy creation for 4k editing.
I don't believe iMovie has this capability, but FCPx DOES.
Watch the YouTube explanations of this, you can see the difference it makes.
You can download and try FCPx free for 30 days, I believe.
That will permit you to do some "test edits" and see if it helps any.
Like Samuelsan said, the video card IS NOT upgradeable.
What you have now, is all you're going to have.
Pay attention to what I said regarding Final Cut Pro and proxy creation for 4k editing.
I don't believe iMovie has this capability, but FCPx DOES.
Watch the YouTube explanations of this, you can see the difference it makes.
You can download and try FCPx free for 30 days, I believe.
That will permit you to do some "test edits" and see if it helps any.
Second the SSD recommendation. My understanding of how FCPX works is it is rendering to a temp file in the background. This makes it blazing fast (compared to Premier Pro) in the final render. But also means as you work with your video disk speed can have an impact.
This may help slightly but I get the feeling its the dual core CPU and poor iGPU that is his bottleneck on this use case.
I can see the quad cores helping. But, does FCPX use the GPU to accelerate it's calculations? If so, I hope their experience with programming AMD GPUs is better than mine has been. In contrast, Nvidia GPUs and Cuda are great and a breeze to use.
Yep FCPX is optimised for amd and is pretty much the current top performer for 4K rendering times on a decent Mac.
Just a note; have u considered upgrading the RAM to 16 Gb?...might help.
SSD is a must, especially for the intensive video editing tasks.
I'm using a late 2011 MBP also, I wish you luck.