It did not occur to me until after the shoot that 60fps might be a strain on the computer compared to 30fps.
I shot some video on my iPhone 7 Plus for a friend who edits in iMovie and used 1080p 60fps.
Unfortunately I could not conduct these tests on my very powerful HP workstation because it doesn’t run iMovie (of course). If there is almost no movement then the 4K video was sharper but as soon as some movement was introduced, the 60fps 1080P video was vastly superior.Ģ013 model: 3.2 GHz quad-core i5 with hyper threading, 8GB of RAM, Nvidia GT755M 1GB RAMĢ009 model: 2.66 GHz quad-core i5 without hyper threading, 12GB of RAM, ATI Radeon 4850 with 512MB RAM It doesn’t matter whether the subject was moving, birds flying, or human movement of the camera. appearance of the final results depends on the degree of movement in the video. The newer iMac was rock stead for 1080P and only minor jerks at 4K.Ħ. smoothness of the editing process: the older iMac was modestly jerky for the 1080P 60fps clip but I didn’t find it terribly objectionable. This does not include any human tasks such as trimming and connecting clips, adding sound files or other adjustments such as for color.ĥ. so if we just consider the processing tasks of “stabilize, fix rolling shutter and share file” for a 1 hour video the older iMac would take 20H38M while the newer one would be 3H53M. Take the time to stabilize 1 hour of video: 9 hrs, 21 min on the older machine vs 1 hr, 14 minutes on the newer oneĤ. the newer iMac averaged about 4-6 times faster for most tasks. While this card is technically not rated for 4K, it worked just fine.ģ. clips came from a Panasonic FZ1000, captured to a Panasonic 64GB U1 SDXC memory card. both machines could fully process both the 1080P 60fps and 4K 30fps video clips with identical image quality.Ģ. The detail specs of these systems are below.ġ. These tests were conducted on two different iMacs, late 2009 and late 2013. I have no idea what was causing the problems, something heavy must have been running in the background. For example, I had stated that my 2009 iMac could not play 4K video much less edit in iMovie. I use Filmora, which does, and bar the long time to export, even 4k is a doddle.Ĭorrecting my prior responses after some additional testing. My 5K 27" HP monitor was the same price as the Apple 27" QHD.ĭoes iMovie support the use of proxy files (lower resolution & bitrate copies of the main files)? The proxy files are used for editing, and then the original files are swapped in before export of the finished movie.
My HP workstation with 6-core Xeon and 40 GB of ECC RAM was 1/3rd the price of the equivalent Mac Pro. There is a reason the world of video editing is slowly but steadily moving to Windows, the sheer cost of powerful hardware. Nevertheless of the machine has an i7 quad core processor no more than about 3 years old, video card and 8GB of RAM then it should work well at 1080. Even Lightroom is rather slow with Sony RAW images on this machine.
Haven't tried 4K yet on that machine.Īs an aside, my son's 2 year old MacBook Pro with dual-core ui5 and 16gb of RAM struggles with 1080 video from his Sony A7. My wife's late 2014 iMac its very smooth at 1080p, same software, just newer hardware. QuickTime can play the 1080 clips just fine but video editing requires considerably more power under the hood.
The hardware couldn't handle a 30 fps 4k clip at all. The OP is not concerned with whether it will work but whether it will work well and that depends on the hardware configuration.įor 1080p at either 30 or 60 fps, iMovie is barely useable on my late 2009 iMac: quad-core i5 with 12 GB of RAM and a video card from that era. She could pickup a prior version of Premiere Elements for not much money on Craigslist or eBay. Adobe Premiere Elements is vastly superior as are several other products and they don't cost much. The Apple iMovie video editing workflow is one of the worst of available. Note that iMovie can no longer add menus, for that you need iDVD which is one of the world's worse programs from the perspective of usability. while above I said that her first step was stabilization but sometimes she waited until after she had performed her clipping if the clipping was going to be significant because stabilization can be slow.add the clips that interested her to a project (Project / New).optionally burn as she has family members without a computer, again nothing to watch.render, off again for some time, nothing to watch here.start Stabilization and then go do something else, nothing to watch there.My wife (on a slightly faster iMac than mine) would: Of course things like rendering are slower but no need to watch them.