The best computer for video editing provides optimal performance for running Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, After Effects, Maya, and other professional editing programs. Rendering and encoding footage at HD and higher resolutions demands a mid- to-high end CPU and a good amount of DRAM. Which components provide the non-negotiable performance needed for the job? Which ones provide the nice-to-have benefits that fall within your budget ranges? We’ll ferret all that out in this post.

Here’s a quick set of component recommendations for the best computer for video editing at several price increments. Windows PCs are the primary focus here. Learn more below the table about how I arrived at these, and viable substitutes for each.

January 24th, 2017 at 6:59 AM This article in an example of someone not actually in the business, rather put together by searching around the web. The article fails to mention how many PCI-e lanes that each CPU supports. This is very important because most editors will want a separate card for output monitoring that is 30 bit and supports true 4K.

The author tells you to look at the difference between on-board and dedicated RAID. Dedicated RAID is the only way to go.

Storage, CPU And Memory System Configurations for Video Editing. This can be a touchy topic, and it delves far into the 'Mac versus PC' realm often.

On board RAID uses significant CPU resources and is not recommended for anything other than a RAID-0. The author claims you don’t need a Quadro card for AVID Media Composer. That is not true.

While Media Composer will;’start’ effects playback will be slow. Media Composer does REQUIRE a Quadro if you ever need to talk to AVID tech support, Without a Quadro, your system is not ‘qualified’ according to AVID and ANY problem you have will be blamed on that issue and they will not talk to you. If editing is just a hobby, follow this author’s advice. If your livelihood depends on the correct hardware, then contact a company like mine that specializes in this type of hardware.

Since Apple last shipped a desktop Mac with the word “pro” in the name, the has arrived. Holding down the high end of the Mac product line until the day (hopefully in 2018) when a new Mac Pro arrives, the iMac Pro fuses the look of the with the priorities of a professional workstation.

This is not a computer designed for the masses—a new iMac Pro starts at $5,000 and you can pay five figures for a high-end model. If you aren’t sure if you need the power of the iMac Pro, you almost certainly don’t. If, on the other hand, you are hungry for multi-core performance and a powerful GPU that will let you crank through intense tasks—in video editing, software development, photo and audio processing, science, graphics, and similar applications—this is the new Mac Pro you’ve been looking for, albeit in the shape of an iMac. The evolution of the pro Mac There was a time when most serious Mac users used a professional desktop Mac. The Power Mac line (later renamed the Mac Pro) wasn’t just high end, but mid-range—if you were looking for the cheapest, least powerful Mac you could buy a Performa or iMac, but serious users bought a Power Mac. IDG Second-generation (left) and first-generation Mac Pro designs.

But over the past decade, Apple has boosted the power available in the iMac line while positioning the Mac Pro as an expensive product limited to the most high-end work. So many of the Power Mac chauvinists of 2000 became the 5K iMac users of 2015. I’m one of them.

As a result, a “pro Mac desktop” doesn’t mean what it did. There are plenty of mainstream professional users with the need for decent computing power who don’t need to buy anything beyond a 5K iMac. Still, there are a bunch of tasks that require pushing the edges of performance beyond what the 5K iMac can provide. And I have to admit, lately I’ve realized that I don’t fit comfortably in that category either: The more video editing and audio work I do, using software that maxes out my iMac’s processor cores and still takes excruciatingly long to finish doing its work, the more I come to desire faster processors, more cores, and faster storage. The iMac Pro delivers all of that.

It’s what’s inside that counts When I swapped my 2014 5K iMac for an iMac Pro, my workspace didn’t change much. At a glance the iMac Pro is just an iMac (with a 27-inch 5K display with support for the full P3 color gamut) in a slightly darker shade of silver. (And yes, the peripherals supplied by Apple—a wireless keyboard with number pad, mouse, and optional trackpad—are available in the same Space Gray shade, for now only with this computer.) Inside, though, this is not like any iMac ever before made. I bought and tested the $4,999 base model, which is powered by an 8-core 3.2GHz Xeon W processor.

Give your new virtual machine a name (I just called it “Mac OS X”) and set the operating system to “Mac OS X Server (64-bit)”. Step 2: Click Next and choose how much RAM to give your virtual machine. Mac os x os install for windows. See the picture of step number one.