Mac Mini for editing

[John Forsythe]

I use Adobe CS6 Premiere and I need a new computer. I mostly shoot footage with my GP3 Black at either 1080p60fps or 2k@30fps. My 4 year old current macmini chokes and dies.

Would a new current macmini with 16gigs of ram and the intel HD4000 be useable to edit footage at those resolutions? Would it choke on 4k? Ill be putting in two aftermarket ssd's for the OS and a scratch drive.

I will probably invest in a GH3 by the end of the year.

Thank you.

[Rick L. Allen]

Adobe Premiere Pro System Requirements (CS6) - Mac OS

Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support
Mac OS X v10.6.8, v10.7, or v10.8**
4GB of RAM (8GB recommended)
4GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash storage devices)
Additional disk space required for preview files and other working files (10GB recommended)
1280x900 display
7200 RPM hard drive (multiple fast disk drives, preferably RAID 0 configured, recommended)
OpenGL 2.0–capable system
DVD-ROM drive compatible with dual-layer DVDs (SuperDrive for burning DVDs; Blu-ray burner for creating Blu-ray Disc media)
QuickTime 7.6.6 software required for QuickTime features
Optional: Adobe-certified GPU card for GPU-accelerated performance
This software will not operate without activation. Broadband Internet connection and registration are required for software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services.* Phone activation is not available.

[Harm Millaard]

Originally Posted by John Forsythe

Would a new current macmini with 16gigs of ram and the intel HD4000 be useable to edit footage at those resolutions? Would it choke on 4k? Ill be putting in two aftermarket ssd's for the OS and a scratch drive.

Depends on what you find usable. If a certain task on a proper desktop takes 1 minute, say for exporting a 10 minute timeline and it takes more than 1 hour on a Mac mini for the same timeline, is that usable? If the same desktop can not do a 4 camera multicam from a GoPro Hero 3 without showing choppy behaviour, despite hardware MPE, is a Mac mini, that is at least 40 times slower, still usable?

The level of patience and tolerance for editing such very difficult codecs differs from person to person. For me it would be absolutely intolerable, For you it may be different.

[Byron Jones]

I think you can do it. I use a MacBook Pro with an i5 and 8gigs of RAM and an external scratch disk to edit 3 hr multicam shoots (4 cameras). I don't have to sit around waiting for pinwheels with 1080p footage. The mini can have an i7 and 16gigs of RAM. Add a solid state drive for the OS and a fast external setup for scratch. The thunderbolt and HDMI outputs are nice too. Plus you will have more room on the desk...

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Depends on what you find usable. If a certain task on a proper desktop takes 1 minute, say for exporting a 10 minute timeline and it takes more than 1 hour on a Mac mini for the same timeline, is that usable?

I often see you are using a very high end system with a lot of harddrives in a raid as a reference, 1 minute output for 10 minutes of film also usually means a uncompressed codec to a very fast raid system so I don't see how this can be a "fair" comparison.
I don't have a Mac mini but equiped with a 2,6ghz I7 and with usb 3 and thunderbolt editing from external drives shouldn't be an issue either. I can't imagine this set up to be "that" much slower then let's say my 2 year old I7 950.
I do think however Premiere pro is not a program to run on the mac mini as we all know how taxing it can be and that it does require a very fast system with specific hardware to get the most from it, fcpx should be a much better choice as you could resort to a intermediate codec to take the load from the processor.