iMac final cut question

[Deloperc]

I am using final cut 7 and am considering an iMac 27 i7. Will the combination of the ssd and 1gig drive speed the machine up for more than booting the program ? Or should I buy a 2 gig drive with no ssd. Will the ssd speed up final cut once I am working with the program. Any difference for aperture ?

 

[derbothaus]

I am using final cut 7 and am considering an iMac 27 i7. Will the combination of the ssd and 1gig drive speed the machine up for more than booting the program ? Or should I buy a 2 gig drive with no ssd. Will the ssd speed up final cut once I am working with the program. Any difference for aperture ?

Having 3.7GHz in turbo for the 2 threads FCP7 generally uses will be enough to notice definitely. What are you coming from? Better assessment if I knew that.
But really the i7 3.4GHz iMac and the 3.33GHz 6-core Mac Pro are the fastest Apple sells for general Final Cut work outside of multithreaded 3rd party plugins that may be faster with more cores.
If you can do it, always get an SSD for boot. An SSD will speed most things up including moderate increases to the supporting HDD as well as it is only grabbing large chunks of data at a time.
I'd get the 256GB or 240GB SSD and a 2TB/ 1TB Data/Capture scratch/Home directory drive. Then I'd archive to Thunderbolt or FW800 externals.

 

[Boogsephine]

Final Cut Pro (7.0.3) runs quickly on my 27" iMac i7. I put in 16GB of RAM and can run FCP and other programs and it is just fine for me.

I'm sure if you were using a ton of memory consuming applications at the same time, the Mac Pro would be much better but I am usually only running FCP, Photoshop / After Effects and some internet apps.

Hope this is some help to ya!