20 inch iMAC soars with Final Cut Pro

Here is our first review of the new 20 inch Apple iMAC in terms of performance with Final Cut Pro.

*Also, Apple now ships a 24 inch iMAC, which is even a better choice for Final Cut Pro editors.

First off, it ships with the new Tiger 10.4 operating system. Since Final Cut Pro 5.0 hasn't shipped yet, we were nervous to see if FCP 4.5HD would work properly. We are proud to announce, it seems to be rock solid! We compared the speed to a Dual Gig G4 system, and the iMAC seemed to process complicated effects about 3-4X faster.

Here are the items we like about the new iMAC.

- Nice 20 inch display with 1680 x 1050 pixels (native)
- Extremely Portable, computer is built right into the screen display
- Easy to upgrade (back panel pops off) Adding RAM was no problem
- Ships with ATI 9600 Pro graphics card (with 128 megs of video ram)
- Includes built in airport-extreme
- Includes built in Blue-tooth
- Ships with Dual Layer DVD R/W drive
- USB 2.0 ports (on the back)
- S-video and Composite outputs

We are extremely happy to see a Dual Layer DVD drive, and a beefy graphics card to FCP Studio users can run Apple Motion.

Our only gripe, is there are no firewire 800 ports on this system. This means playing HD footage may be a bit of a challenge with standard fireware 400 drives.

Our only reccomendation for Final Cut Pro or FCP Studio Users, is that you should upgrade the RAM to a minimum of 1 GIG. Unfortunately, there are only two ram slots, so there isn't much room to upgrade in the future. Unless you toss our your old 512mb chips.

Although, there isn't much room to upgrade this system, we believe it will take you a good 3 years before this system falls behind the technological curve.

Once again, Apple comes through big time with the new 20 inch iMAC. In our opinion, this system configured with Final Cut Studio is one of the best digital editing packages you can buy for your money.