Can I Play/Edit 4k Videos on My Older iMac?

[wardzach2007]

I bought my iMac around 4-5 years ago and now I'm trying to edit and play 4k videos from the DJI Phantom.

I tried recording in 1080p 30fps and that seems to be my limit and even that is a little choppy while doing production work.

Am I able to upgrade something for my iMac to be able to play and edit these high quality videos or is my machine to old for this?

 

[joema2]

I edit a lot of 4k video from Sony A7RII, Panasonic GH4 and DJI Phantom Vision 3 Pro. It can be very taxing even on a late-model computer. DJI or GoPro video seems worse because it may be more highly compressed. Whatever the reason it can be slow and clunky to edit. This is using FCP X on a top-spec 2013 iMac 27.

On FCP X, one solution is picking the display option "Better Performance" which sacrifices playback quality for frame rate. Although FCP X normally handles well editing of camera native files, for highly compressed files like GoPro/DJI it may be better to transcode on import to optimized ProRes material.

Another solution is generate proxy files and edit those. Those are lower-resolution files which an older PC can better handle. Then when editing is finished, FCP X can seamlessly apply all those edits to the full res file for export.

Beyond just editing, applying effects are a lot slower on 4k material, some worse than others. Very compute-bound effects like stabilization, de-flicker, etc can be extremely slow. For this reason it's a good idea for anybody working with 4k seriously to consider a new machine.