Avid Xpress or Media Composer on intel iMac

By John on October 31, 2006 10:40 AM | Permalink

Will the new 24 inch iMac run Avid Media Composer?

In a previous article, I attempted to load Avid Xpress onto a 20 inch iMac with limited success. The 20 inch model uses an ATI X1600 graphics card, and although I got it to work, the performance wasn't that great.

The new 24 inch iMac's come preconfigured with either than Nvidia 7300GT, or the 7600GT. I opted for the upgrade to the 7600GT. The Avid software seems to be much more user friendly with the Nvidia graphics chipset.

If you haven't seen the new 24 inch iMac, you are missing a thing of beauty. For just over $2000, you get a 24 inch Hi Def screen with a streamlined computer built right into the monitor. This makes the computer system extremely portable.

For Avid Xpress and Media Composer enthusiasts, you must wait for a universal version of the software to run correctly on the new intel based iMac's while running OS X. Unfortunately, the software will not run on an OS X machine using the new Intel chipset.

Since the new iMacs use an Intel based chipset, you can download a beta version of Apple's Bootcamp software and install a full copy of Windows XP on the machine. As a test, I wondered if Avid's latest version of Media Composer software would run correctly if I installed Windows XP Professional using Apple's bootcamp software.

I am happy to report, that this configuration seems to work. Better yet, it will even run the Avid Studio Toolkit applications without any errors. Yes, this even includes Pro Tools! All of the Open GL effect's ran flawlessly. I did some hard core rendering tests, and the rendering seemed to be quite speedy.

Keep in mind this is currently an unsupported configuration. However, if you are lucky enough to own one of these new 24 inch iMacs, you might consider loading the Avid Media Composer software onto it.