I bought a new iMac (MK462LL/A) computer. The specs are: 27' Retina 5K IPS Display 5120 x 2880 Screen Resolution 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 (Skylake) 8GB of 1867 MHz DDR3 RAM 1TB 7200 rpm HDD AMD Radeon R9 M380 GPU (2GB GDDR5) 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 Thunderbolt 2 + USB 3.0 Magic Keyboard & Magic Mouse 2 Included Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan I plan to upgrade the RAM to 32GB myself. I want to edit XAVC S, 4K video shot with my Sony FDR-AX100 camcorder using Final Cut Pro X. I really don't want to spend the extra money for the i7 processor model.

Office excel 2008 for mac beach ball when quitting. Has anyone used this same or similar model iMac to edit 4K video? If so, did it work well? I don't mind if the rendering time takes longer, I just don't want a lot of lagging or choppy video play when editing.

Editing 4K videos with a 2560 x 1440 monitor is perfectly doable, like I have for years. Even if you don't edit 4K videos, you can still get a 4K monitor because of the second reason. Downside of 4K. Because 4K is 4 times 1080P's resolution, the user interface will appear small as you're squeezing 8,294,400 pixels onto the screen.

I have not taken the computer out of the box yet, as I may return it if I find out the specs are not up to editing 4K. Hi Danny, The GPU is not only important for increased rendering speed. A better GPU also presents a big benefit when you want to work natively with highly compressed footage such as XAVC S. When you play video, your computer needs to de-compress every frame in realtime so you can see the full quality playing. That is done by the GPU. When you work with an edit-friendly full-frame codec such as ProRes 422, the GPU does not need to work hard to decompress the video frames on the fly. But when you work natively with very compressed XAVC, AVCHD or H.264 video, the GPU will have to work much harder.

If you optimize the XAVC 4K footage to ProRes before editing, you won't have any issues at all. But wether an i5 is fast enough to decode native 4K XAVC on the fly (while also handling many other processes), without any hickups, I don't know. I do know the 5K 27' iMac with an i7 handles any given native video you throw at it very well, I have a few ones of these. But I cannot guarantee that the i5 is up to the same task.

I think you should test this first. Best wishes, Ronny. Update: I exchanged to the next step up with a better graphics card and a 2TB Fusion hard drive. 27' Retina 5K Display with IPS Technology Intel Core i5 Processor 3.3GHz Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan 8GB DDR3-1867 RAM 2TB Fusion Drive AMD Radeon R9 M395 SDXC Card Slot 10/100/1000 Network 802.11ac Wireless Bluetooth 4.0 I am going to upgrade to 32GB of RAM and try editing my 4K videos with FCP-X. I have 15 days to return it if I need to.

I will report back here with my review of how well this system works for me. Thanks for the two replies so far! Hello everyone. I have a similar question to the posed above, and looking for help. I am looking to make the jump to buying the brand new IMAC 27inch with the 5k Retina display to replace my original IMAC that I purchased back in 2009.

I am pretty set on a machine, but have a few questions to be budget conscious. Let me start off by saying that I am still running Final Cut Studio 3 and have not upgraded to FCPX. I don't really intend to get FCPX as I am very pleased with Studio 3. The only draw back is that I lost Motion when I upgraded to the Sierra OS I mainly work with full HD footage, and haven't done any 4K work yet. RAM vs GRAPHICS CARD.

Should I stay with 16 Gigs of RAM or should I invest in the 32 gigs? Should I get the AMD RADEON R9 M395 with 2 gigs of video memory or invest in the M395X with 4 gigs of memory? If I can only have one or the other, which should I invest the most money in?