Final Cut Pro X: Should I Upgrade My Computer Hardware?

Updated 02/12/12

Before discussing what hardware you need in order to take advantage of Final Cut Pro X, if you're interested in a deeper discussion of the relevant technologies, the folks at Silverado prepared a white paper on the subject that you can download here. Their white paper was written in 2011, before FCP X was released, but the explanations of the technologies that they offered continue to be valid.

Overall, there are four technological advances of the past few years that affect our ability to use Final Cut X to full advantage and should affect our choices in terms of hardware upgrades. First is 64-bit computing, which permits full access to a system’s RAM.  Next is hyper-threading, which enables a computer’s processors to do double duty.   Third is Turbo Boost, which, according to Apple, allows a computer processor to "run above its base operating frequency via dynamic control of the CPU's clock rate.  Okay.  Sounds Good.  

Both hyper-threading and Turbo Boost together are used together as part of Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology.  Any post-2009 Mac Pro or a MacBook Pro bought in 2011 has this technology.  As of 2012, iMacs all have Turbo Boost, but the i5 does not support hyper-threading.  The iMac i7 does support hyper-threading.

Fourth is OpenCL. This technology allows the computer’s main processors (CPUs) to offload processing duties to the graphics card’s GPU. GPUs have advanced faster than CPUs in terms of computing power in the last few years. While more graphics cards are coming out with OpenCL support, many don’t have it. NVDIA cards, for example, employ a similar but propriety technology called CUDA, which is used by Adobe in Premiere Pro and After Effects. Right now you can only get a graphics card that has one or the other technology. If you’re primarily going to be editing using FCP X, Motion 5 and Compressor, here is Apple’s list of OpenCL-supported graphics cards. 

And their list of graphics cards that don’t support OpenCL.

So what if I don’t have the latest Mac Pro or Macbook Pro? Should I run out and buy the latest computer to take full advantage of these new technologies? How old is too old? Before Final Cut Pro X’s release, I speculated that arguments in favor of upgrading to the very latest technology were based a presumption that more is always better. Of course there’s an advantage in getting the newest, fastest, RAM-maxed computer. But a more real-world question for many is: is it necessary? Would we really need solid state for our main hard drive and external drives, as the folks at Siverado were saying? Would advantages that were gained by doing this matter? If you have a BMW, do you really need to trade it in for a Ferrari?

Another possibility was that Final Cut Pro X, as a modern program written from the ground up, would take greater advantage of an older system’s resources and run faster and smoother without the need to upgrade. Of the four technologies discussed above, a pre-2009 Mac Pro only has 64 bit computing, whereas a 2009 or later Mac Pro has three of the four technologies built in: 64 bit computing, a chip set with hyper-threading, and Turbo Boost. Only an OpenCL graphics card was not part of the package. The question was not what would make the program the most powerful it could be, but what would make it powerful enough for you?

Nine months after Final Cut Pro X's release we have answers. At the time, I owned  a pre-2009 Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. My experience was that the program worked -- but only most of the time and not that well. Installing Lion helped, but not enough. FCP X crashed too often, and waiting for some things to render before they played smoothly was still required, a problem Final Cut Pro X was designed to solve.

But editors I knew with 2009 systems updated with Lion found FCPX relatively stable and fast. In the end, the sweet spot for using Final Cut Pro X is to run it on any post-2009 computer in Lion using an OpenCL graphics card. My experience has been that the program is stable, smooth, fast, and has no problem playing a timeline back without waiting for background rendering to finish.

This real world result splits the difference between my speculations and those of the max-everything-out crowd.  A 2008 Mac Pro is not quite good enough, but you can get away with your 2009 Mac Pro just fine. The lastest iMac i7 is also fine; no Mac Pro necessary.  In the end, you don’t need a solid state drive or the latest Mac Pro, but an OpenCL graphics card helps to make the the video editing experience particularly smooth and problem free.

I’ll pat myself on the back. Half right is better than wrong.