A Mac, Solely For File Conversion

[CdyVnd]

Hello all! I am an assistant editor at a post-house in Los Angeles, and we are constantly converting dailies / HD and 4K footage for television shows, films, etc. to other formats. We have three assistant editors in our department, and we each have Mac Pros with 2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-core Intel Xeons and 8 GB 1066 Mhz DDR3 RAM. Not the BEST we could have, but certainly not the worst.

We are looking to purchase a fourth system to take some processing pressure off of our systems, and have it as a file-conversion computer that is running all the time. An iMac would probably be the best solution, because we wouldn't need a monitor, and it's low-profile. What would you all recommend? Is there an alternative system that would be better for file-conversion only? Thanks!

 

[CWallace]

An iMac has a monitor - either 21" or 27".

Do you perhaps mean a Mac Mini?

And when you say "file conversion", I assume you mean converting video from one format to another?

The Mac Mini and iMac both offer quad-core i7 processors, which would be my recommendation since most video conversion software should be multi-core and multi-threaded. I have a 4-core / 8-thread i7 on my iMac and it does a fair job at video conversion (though my i7 is a 3.4GHz desktop-class CPU compared to the 2.3GHz / 2.6GHz mobile-class CPUs in the Mac Mini)

 

[forty2j]

Honestly, that's pretty much what the Mac Pros do. In your situation I'd buy one of the new ones coming out later this year. If you don't want an additional monitor there's plenty of options for connecting to it from your existing workstations to fire it off. But you're better off with desktop workstation GPUs, rather than consumer gaming mobile GPUs, doing your conversion work.