A pro video editor’s opinion

What the new iMac’s target market really thinks

Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different computers from various brands to do high-end video editing. And I ask a lot from them. Now that 4K video is the norm in my sector of the industry, this has really put the cat among the pigeons when it comes to performance – doing anything in real time with a timeline full of 4K clips tends to bring a lot of computers to their knees. I was thrilled to get the chance to see how the iMac Pro copes with this.

For my work during the time I had the iMac Pro, I was using Adobe Premiere Pro CC with RED raw footage, Canon C200 CinemaRawLite and some lower tier Sony FS7 XAVC clips to see how it performed.

Watching 4K footage on the iMac Pro’s screen was a joy. The colour space and contrast showcases your footage beautifully, but I soon found myself wishing I had more than 27 inches of screen to monitor the clips and still have space for scrubbing through the timeline or utilising other windows. The computer does have multiple Thunderbolt 3 ports for adding extra displays, though.

With various 4K clips in a timeline, I was immediately impressed that no frames were dropped in playback

Ingesting footage was instantaneous, and after I added the various 4K clips to a timeline, I was immediately impressed that there were no dropped frames whatsoever in playback. Adding multiple live colour grading adjustments during playback and making amends to their settings didn’t affect the experience either – even when playing them full screen. At one point, I had more than four layers of effects on a clip before playback started missing frames, and even warp stabilisation – a resource-intensive tool for reducing motion in videos – took moments and not the usual minutes to prepare.

The iMac did start to struggle with 8K RED footage, and when effects were added a preview render was needed – but this was to be expected. 8K is really hardcore.

Exporting was also really impressive. I queued up a web-friendly, one-minute video made up of random 4K clips to export in H.264 format, using a resolution of 4096x2160 pixels, two passes, and a target bitrate of 25Mbps. This rendered within three minutes. That’s as much as five times faster than my usual (pretty beastly) PC . The process was surprisingly quiet and, though cooling fans weren’t heard, the iMacPro didn’t become noticeably warmer. Absolutely amazing.