I started out with this project using my 2014 iMac 5k. It’s a pretty nicely specced out machine particularly for the time, a 4GHz 4-core i7 with 32GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD drive. About as good as it got back in 2014. I think it was the first year of the slimline iMacs. But for video production, there are a few bottlenecks with this machine. One is the editing and encoding, both of which take a long time with files in the tens of gigabytes size. 1TB isn’t much to work with either, once you get those large files, so you have to work across the network to a NAS of some kind, and then the 1Gbit/s network also gets in the way. I could alleviate that somewhat with a Sonnet 10 Gb ethernet interface for Thunderbolt 2, getting around 250-300 MB/sec. I guess you see where this is going…
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