Final Cut Pro X on a MBP 2011?

[alexjholland]

Hey, I am moving to Australia next month (from the chilly UK) and have been selling and consolidating my possessions, including my mid-2010 iMac i7 (with SSD drive) which still works great, but obviously doesn't make sense to take with me.

Given I want a minimum 1TB SSD and ideally 2TB, I'd need to spend £2,500-£3,000 on a new MacBook Pro, which I don't mind doing, but can't afford at this exact moment.

Fortunately, a friend kindly gave me his 2011 MacBook Pro i5, which I fitted with a 1TB SSD in the boot drive, a 1TB spinner in the optical drive (for music and films) and 8GB RAM; the RAM upgrade also bumping the Intel 3000 integrated graphics from 384MB to 512MB.

I'm really pleased with how it runs for music production (my main use) but am interested in editing video on Final Cut Pro X, especially as my girlfriend bought me a GoPro Session for Christmas.

My iMac handled FCPX fine, but had a discrete GPU; whereas this MBP has the Intel 3000.

- Will I be able to use this MBP for editing video?

I'm not expecting to do 4K feature movies; just 720p/60FPS or 1080/60FPS edits.. maybe three-four minutes long with some music too?

I'm aware it may take a while to render, which is OK; I've just seen reviews of the new MacBook (the thin, hideously underpowered one), saying it rendered so slowly it was basically unuseable.

I mean.. mine might be a 2011 model, but was current when Final Cut Pro X was first released.. so surely must work on it?

And are later versions of FCPX more, or less hungry for resources?

Cheers

 

[Unami]

sure, it works. you can always use proxy-files. i sometimes run fcpx on a 2009 13" mbp and it works. granted, i wouldn't dream of throwing something cpu-intensive like the neat-video plugin at it, but for basic editing it's still fine. as far as i can tell, fcpx hasn't gotten any more resource hungry since it's release, it might even have gotten faster.

i doubt that the new mbp is that slow - on paper it should be faster than the one that came before and it also got intel's quick-sync built into the skylake chips, which should make it significantly faster when encoding h.264 compared to a 2011 mbp. i also don't think it's worth it's money, but i wouldn't call it underpowered either - just underpowered for it's price, but that's probably due to it's really unnecessary thinness and that useless touch-bar.

 

[alexjholland]

sure, it works. you can always use proxy-files. i sometimes run fcpx on a 2009 13" mbp and it works. granted, i wouldn't dream of throwing something cpu-intensive like the neat-video plugin at it, but for basic editing it's still fine. as far as i can tell, fcpx hasn't gotten any more resource hungry since it's release, it might even have gotten faster.

i doubt that the new mbp is that slow - on paper it should be faster than the one that came before and it also got intel's quick-sync built into the skylake chips, which should make it significantly faster when encoding h.264 compared to a 2011 mbp. i don't think it's worth the money either, but i wouldn't call it underpowered either - just underpowered for it's price, but that's probably due to it's really unnecessary thinness.

Great! I'd be happy just to slice/organise footage of us surfing and doing fun stuff, with fades between shots, music and the odd bit of text.. a few slow-motion clips.

I'd likely tweak the colour, but don't anticipate any need for plugins or 3D graphics etc.

I will inevitably buy a new, top-end MBP, but hope to get two-three years out of this one first.
[doublepost=1484135511][/doublepost]Also, will upgrading to 16GB RAM make much difference?

 

[Boyd01]

I used the trial version on a base model 2012 Mac Mini (2.5ghz dual i5 with 16gb RAM and HD4000 graphics). Seemed to work just fine, I was working with legacy SD footage however.

 

[Macyourdayy]

I forgot about the 13" mbp's and made suggestions assuming you had a 15". Apologies.