Need advice on upgrading my system to deal with more and more 4K

[mackcj1184]

Hello!

Other than adding external drives, I have not changed my system in 4 years. It's been working great, mostly until a recent project with all 4K footage. We delivered in 1080, so I was able to make proxies for most of the footage, and the edit went mostly fine, but after several revisions, the exports always seemed to have some glitch or stutter and eventually my timeline got to a point where it just refused to play back the video. I've come up with workarounds to get this project delivered, but I know I need to upgrade, and I need to do it fast. I know I need more RAM and am planning to order 128g. Could someone please look at my system specs and see if you can suggest any other upgrades?

System Specs

2019 27" iMac Retina 5K

2TB Fusion Drive

3.7 GHz Intel Core i5 

32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB

3 6 TB Seagate external hard drives

1 Kingston 1TB SSD 

1 SanDisk 1 TB SSD

Thanks for the help!

Chris

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi mack,

Thanks for the message. Your system probably needs updating for certain workflows, like intensive 4K productions. We can try troubleshooting if you like.

• In duration, how long is the sequence you are exporting?
  • Long sequences with 4K H.264 or HEVC source footage might require greater hardware resources, especially if you are also exporting to the same.
• Do you have extensive color grading, stabilizing, or GPU-accelerated effects added to clips in this sequence?
  • If you have overloaded an already long timeline with effects, you can receive poor-quality exports when utilizing the GPU for exporting to Long GOP codecs like H.264 and HEVC, as it is used not only to handle effects but also the encoding and decoding process.
• Is your source media a Long GOP codec, like H.264 or HEVC?
  • If your source media is an editing codec, like ProRes or DNxHD/HR, then your GPU can be used for effects handling, playback and is less taxed on export.
  • You can also leverage a workflow called "smart rendering" which is advantageous for handling heavy productions on equipment that is past its expiration date.

As a rule of thumb, in the editing world, I learned that any computer over five years old is usually a candidate for upgrading or replacement.

I hope the troubleshooting information might help you achieve a smoother workflow. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Kevin

[mackcj1184]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the quick reply! I'll answer your questions in order:

In duration, how long is the sequence you are exporting?

 This one is 6 minutes long, and is a typical project length for me. 

Do you have extensive color grading, stabilizing, or GPU-accelerated effects added to clips in this sequence?

Several clips are using stabilization, and many clips have been sped-up or slowed down. Also several stills with moves. Would you suggest that I render out these types of clips before including in the timeline?

Is your source media a Long GOP codec, like H.264 or HEVC?

Most are AVC1 with some HEVC.

Thanks for the suggestions! I know that optimally, I should just get a new machine, but since I haven't upgraded the memory yet, I was hoping to get another year or two out of this one.  Are there any other upgrades that might help? Any additional best practices to keep it running smoothly? If I were to upgrade the iMac, what are some minimal specs I should be looking for?

Thanks again for your help!

Chris

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi,

That doesn't seem overly long, then. I wonder if deleting the media cache might help the situation. Press Shift at launch and choose that option from the Reset Options dialog box.

I don't believe you can upgrade an iMac. Sorry about that.

You can try smart rendering by rendering your entire timeline, creating ProRes LT "video preview" files, and after clicking the Using Previews button in the Export Settings and then exporting matching sequence settings, you'll get a large ProRes LT master that should be free of any graphical anomalies. You can use this master to create any H.264 copies you need.

I hope this advice helps.

Thanks,
Kevin

[mackcj1184]

Kevin,

That's a huge help. Thanks so much for those ideas. I'll try to remember to post back here on how those tips worked. 

-chris

[Kevin-Monahan]

Cheers, Chris! @mackcj1184 

[John T Smith]

Ram and video card are 'OK' (could be more/bigger/better but not 'bad')

>Intel Core i5 

Over on the Windows side of things that would be considered 'light duty' for editing 4k video

An i7 or i9 (or the new Apple CPU) would be better

[mackcj1184]

Thanks! This helps. 

[RjL190365]

In that iMac only the RAM is user upgradeable. You're permanently stuck with that 6-core i5 without hyperthreading (so only 6 threads), as well as that pre-RDNA GCN4-based AMD Radeon GPU that frankly does not work well in Premiere Pro - barely above today's integrated on-CPU graphics in relative performance terms. And you cannot upgrade either in any iMac. Plus, the forthcoming macOS 15 (Sequoia) may be the very last version of macOS ever that will support any Intel-powered Mac.

Thus, I strongly recommend an entirely new Mac if you want to work with an increasing amount of 4k.

[mackcj1184]

Thanks, RjL... I think I'm headed towards a new machine. Clearing my cache more often is helping, as well as using proxies.  But this is helping me realize that beefing up RAM probably isn't going to solve these problems. 

[Conrad_C]

But this is helping me realize that beefing up RAM probably isn't going to solve these problems. 

By @mackcj1184

On that note…the way you figure out if more memory will help is to open Activity Monitor and click the Memory tab, then look at the Memory Pressure graph during your typical workload. The more time your Mac spends at low Memory Pressure (green), the less adding memory will help. But the more time your Mac spends time at higher Memory Pressure levels (yellow, orange, or red), the more adding memory will help. 

My Mac with 32GB Unified Memory is usually at reasonable levels (green) of Memory Pressure. In the picture below, it went into yellow for a while because I was doing some intensive stuff in Lightroom Classic. But when I stopped that particular activity, it dropped back down to green. If it had stayed yellow all day long, I would know to order my next Mac with more memory. But Activity Monitor has taught me that, most of the time, 32GB is great for my use cases.

FYI - Memory Pressure is not about “free” memory, because on modern OSs, using available memory as effectively as possible is more important than keeping memory unused, which is why Apple does not even list free memory in Activity Monitor.  Memory Pressure is about how well the total memory system (real memory, compressed memory, purgeable memory, and swap memory) is able to respond to all current memory demands.

[Conrad_C]

Assuming there aren’t any bottlenecks coming from how the caches are set up on the existing SSDs, the 5-year old Core i5 and Radeon 580X are probably the current limitations, and they can’t be upgraded. Upgrading the RAM is unlikely to get you a major performance boost unless the current 32GB is a bottleneck in some way, but a lot of people edit with less memory than that.

We’re now four years into the Mac transition from Intel to ARM (Apple Silicon), and even the earliest M1 Macs in 2020 were beating most Intel Macs. I don’t like to jump to recommending a new computer, but for this, it sounds like it would be better to take the money that was budgeted for a RAM upgrade and instead apply that to a new Mac, if you want to stick with Macs. You would see major speed boosts in all important areas (CPU, GPU, storage)

The base Mac Studio is a good place to start. Without ordering any upgrades, it’s got lots of CPU and GPU cores, 32GB unified memory, and 512GB SSD. But if you’re using a 2TB Fusion Drive and really need all that space internally, then you may need to budget for more internal storage. No components are upgradeable later, so choose wisely at purchase time.

For something to try with your current iMac in the meantime, the old Fusion Drive might be a bottleneck because it basically uses a small SSD as a fast cache for a larger but slower hard drive it’s functionally integrated with. The Adobe caches, such as the performance-sensitive Media Cache, are stored on the boot volume, and because of the hybrid nature of the Fusion Drive, it isn’t a fast boot volume compared to Macs and PCs today where the boot volume is a very fast SSD. If your Adobe caches are currently assigned to the slow-ish Fusion Drive boot volume, you might get a modest speed boost by moving the caches to an SSD…if it’s a fast SSD on a fast external interface, because an iMac has no internal storage slots.

For an Intel iMac, the fastest possible (and most expensive) external SSD connection is an NVMe SSD connected to a Thunderbolt port. In the middle (affordable and maybe fast enough) is an NVMe SSD connected with a USB 3 10Gb/sec enclosure, cable, and port. The relatively slow option would be a SATA SSD connected to a USB 3 5Gb/sec enclosure, cable, and port. (USB 2 is too slow to be considered.)

[mackcj1184]

Wow, great info! I've already moved my cache to an NVMe SSD connected to Thunderbolt, and have found that clearing it before every edit session really helps. I'll be checking out the Mac Studio soon!

Thanks for the help.