Video editing on 24" iMac

[Rhodan]

I have a 24" iMac, 2.4ghz with 2gb RAM, running Leopard. I also have an external Firewire 800 dual drive bay, with two Seagate Barracuda's in RAID 0 (7200rpm with 32mb cache each).

I have loads of vacation / family video that I need to download with iMovie and clean up, and export to DVD etc.

1. Should I upgrade to 4gb RAM, would it make a noticeable difference with the video editing?

2. Should I be editing the video locally on the iMac's harddrive, or should I use the external bay to edit the video? What would offer better performance?

Thanks

 

[r.j.s]

Upgrading to 4GB will make quite a difference.

Always edit the footage on an external, it will make things faster.

 

[Rhodan]

Thanks for the quick reply.

What kind of difference would I be looking at when upgrading to 4gb with regards to video editing? I'm trying to justify the cost of the upgrade.

I've had conflicting reports from people telling me that I should rather edit the video on the iMac's harddrive, which is why I am asking for advice here.

 

[r.j.s]

I don't know how to quantify the difference, but video editing is quite RAM intensive, so the difference will be quite noticeable. You can always try it with 2GB to see if it is fast enough for you.

 

[finnschi]

well yes 4gb is making a difference, I don't get the point of editing External??? even FW 800 is only going to give you a max of 800Mbps... Internal is 8Gbps ??? so internal is MUCH faster.

You Don't really need more than 2 Gb of ram for Family Video, although 4gb is going to speed things up a little, just because iMovie can load more video into the ram so Editing (applying effects.. and stuff) will be faster, and load times too, but the whole Rendering part NOT, thats all cpu dependant!

So at the end you'll save about 5 minutes on 60 minutes footage per edit! (depends on how much "cleanup" you want to do) ... its not worth the cost of 4Gb memory, even tho DDR memory is REALLY cheap right now
and I don't think prices will go that much lower now, just look at DDR1 it got even more expensive!

 

[Rhodan]

Thanks for the replies, I think I've decided on the RAM upgrade.

I'm still stuck on the external vs internal for video editing, so many conflicting messages. Can anyone clear this up?