Videoguys Guide to Thunderbolt

Videoguys by Gary Bettan

Thunderbolt is here!

Thunderbolt is a new, high-speed, dual-protocol I/O technology designed by Intel and introduced by Apple that delivers amazing performance, with ease & simplicity. It makes attaching Thunderbolt enabled storage and I/O cards a breeze. All of the current Apple iMacs, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs and Mac Minis have Thunderbolt. Today’s iMacs with Thunderbolt no longer have the drawback of limited upgradeability. They are easily expandable and support video capture and output as well as professional RAID storage solutions.

New Apple iMacs are an excellent choice for HD video editing.

The new iMac comes with two Thunderbolt super-high speed ports. We recommend a 27 inch iMac with Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. This will cost you under $3,000 and it will do a fantastic job of running the latest Apple, Adobe and Avid software. You'll get outstanding performance and be able to easily handle AVCHD and DSLR footage with some pretty complex timelines. If you are on a tight budget, you could go with 8GB of RAM or an i5 processor but, you will sacrifice some performance as a result. You'll still be able to edit most flavors of HD footage, but the editing will be more sluggish and you may run into issues with multiple layers of HD footage and graphics. iMacs are not easily upgraded, so you may find yourself regretting not getting an i7 and 16GB of RAM - especially with Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. read more...