The top spec Imac - Is it the bees knees or not

[NamanVarsani]

Hello Experts

I have a problem and need help

I want to get into video editing which is using Adobe Premier, After effects.

Is the Imac top spec kitted out (3rd party memory) costing about £1600 -with student discount.

My current PC is not good enough

Also looking into video editing, theres aspects of 3D max involved, not sure exacly how much of it is involved and how much it infulences what i want for a PC.

The Mac Pro is too expensive and if the Imac is not fast enough I might have to go to the dark side,, yep potential a HP workstation

Lastly 1 thing which i would like to clarify is the ability of apple OS being used on a windows PC, I have seen comments saying how bad it is.

 

[12dylan34]

Firstly, 3DS Max isn't currently made for Mac, so you would have to install a Windows partition and reboot every time you wanted to use it. If I had to use 3DS Max extensively, I would go with a PC.

Unless you're working with 4K footage and things are 2 hours long, I would say that a top-of-the-line iMac would be pretty good for Premiere and After Effects. Honestly, I'm still working with After Effects on a 4 year old MacBook Pro and setting the resolution to third or quarter while working with 1080p, fairly complex motion graphics makes it not painful at all. I plan on buying a top spec iMac whenever the new ones are released. In 3D programs you can have a $10,000 Mac Pro and things still don't render instantly, therefore it could still be faster. If you don't mind overnight renders (which I don't see as too much of a problem at this point in my life), the iMac would be fine. a Mac Pro would still take a few hours for the same render.

A PC workstation is going to run you pretty much the same as a Mac Pro, so that's not too much of an alternative. Note that a workstation is not the same as just any fast computer from Dell or HP, it's a class of its own.

As for installing OS X on third party hardware, I would advise against it if you're not too techy and willing to solve hardware problems every once in a while. It involves carefully picking hardware, doing some tricky third party code workarounds to install OS X, and then hoping that it'll work. Any minor update to OS X could brick your computer and result in you having to just sell or throw part of it away if you can't find a fix.