Seeing a friend use final cut and not really having an equivalent for PC, then seeing prices for used older mac minis, I was thinking of maybe getting one for just the purpose of video and pic editing. I could hang it behind my monitor und use the second hdmi input.
As I have absolutely no experience with Macs, anybody care to chime in and give me some input about this idea? Model would probably be a 2008/2009 model for 70 quids.
Mac OS is a very good operating system, and Final Cut is well optimised for it. However, video editing tends to use a LOT of system resources like RAM and CPU, and video rendering will pretty max out your CPU no matter what. Depending on what you’re doing, and the specs of the mac mini in question, it could either be ok, or impossibly slow. If you have a well-specced windows machine, Adobe Premiere is really just as good as FCP.
What @TRAINTRACS said!
I’ve done some video editing work using FCPX, on a 2015 2.7ghz dual core i5 Macbook Pro with 8gb ram, and the process was fairly smooth, especially using the ‘proxy’ setting (FCP creates lower-quality proxy equivalents of your video so that editing runs more smoothly, then renders using the full-quality versions), but rendering still took time, and I wouldn’t want to tax it with anything above 1080.
It really depends what the stats are for the mac mini you’re looking at, and what kind of editing you’d like to do, but I’d suspect it might not perform brilliantly. Or, to put it a different way, it’d probably perform at the standard one would expect for £70 
- it’s a fairly low-risk way to test out the system and the software, so long as you bear in mind it’s not going to be super representative of the experience you’d get from a beefier/more modern machine.
And yeah, while I’ve not used it, Premiere is an industry standard, and runs on PC.
I guess even if rendering takes forever, it won’t be your main computer, so you can just kind of leave it to render overnight or something while you get on with other stuff on your main PC.
Just had a look at 2009 Mac minis and it looks like you’ll be running a core2duo and around 2gb of ram. I have to say I don’t think this is going to be fun for you.
I think at the very least you’ll want a sandy bridge i5 or i7 processor (2011), and I’d highly recommend seeing if you can upgrade the ram to 8gb. You might get by with 4gb but I think 2gb will just be painful.
this would kind of be my idea. Id use Adobe Premiere, but purchasing an annual licence makes no sense. Wouldnt use it enough to make the cost reasonable. There is premiere elements, but I think Id be missing features.
having it render overnight wouldnt be a problem for me. but the program should be useable. doesnt have to be lightning fast, but Im too old for klunkiness. so your point about thinking about a bit more power is definately valid. as I said, no mac experience, and maybe you guys would have said that the older machines run final cut fluently except for rendering.
thanks for the input so far
If you are using a not so decent Mac for editing, I‘d suggest to try Final Cut X because it performs much better on Macs using natively Metal and also you can buy it. For Premiere Pro you better have a CUDA enabled GPU.
Curry’s On eBay are selling the 2018 Mac mini for 400 quid new. Essentially the same as the 2020 version but with smaller ssd (could offset with external drive). If you don’t like it you could sell it back at little loss.
I used to have the older 2008 Mac mini’s, the fan noise was annoying. 2012 was a lot quieter. But if you get one of those you might as well spend a little more for the above deal.
Yeah, maybe worth having a look on Youtube - I remember watching someone testing the Macbook 12 (which was quite expensive, but very underpowered) with FCPX, and it performing surprisingly well. So maybe there are videos with other machines?
This is an over-simplification, but essentially you’ll need the CPU mostly for rendering/previewing, and RAM mostly for actually editing (if you’re happy to let thigns render overnight and they aren’t too intensive). With this in mind, if you do go for a very old CPU, just make sure you are able to upgrade the RAM to make your editing experience manageable.
And seriously, the CPUs from 2011 onwards are a huge step up from the older ones. Intel launched a brand new architecture around that time which changed everything. If you can find a 2011 Mac Mini, you’ll be much happier than with a 2009 one.
I’ve used a 2011 Mac Mini for yeeeears. I only just upgraded it (by buying a 2010 Mac Pro, a whole other topic in itself) because I needed to be able to run more tracks and plugins in Logic.
The 2011 mini has upgradeable RAM and you can even put an SSD in – I did both. Mine has 256gb SSD (I also used the original 500gb HDD in a caddy via USB) and 16gb RAM and it served me really well. I did lots of Lightroom editing and my pics are from a 24mp full frame Nikon, so they’re pretty chunky raw files.
I’ll be selling my mini soon if you’re interested!
I’m running iMac 2010 and Mac book pro 2011 , I’d check what os you need to run as apple stop supporting old machines which may impact running Final Cut Pro. Neither of these machines have been able to install recent versions of Mac OS.
Both machines ran much quicker with ssd’s in them.
Video editing require to pay attention on 4 things :
Graphic card
Ram
Ssd internal (os system)
Ssd external (work cache disk)
I would go imac second hand with i7, graphic card nvidia 2go, 16ram, 2 x 256go SSD
Final cut is overpriced i would go with creative cloud monthly (audition, première, aftereffects)
Or DaVinci Resolve 16, filmora depending skills budget
That’s not really gonna work for £70 is it?
I doubt U get anything for £70
Though I do have an unused Xeon Mac Pro cheese grater thingthat cost £100 ( was cheap at company I worked for )
I should probably turn it on.
Creative cloud is £50 a month, so you’d have paid the cost of FC in 6 months usage, or am I missing something?
Also worth knowing, OP, that if you or someone you know is a student or works in education, Apple sell a ‘pro apps bundle’ with FC and Logic as well as their various add on apps for £200, which is a fairly nice deal.
There’s a free version of Davinci Resolve that’s only missing a few features and is limited either HD or 4K. I can’t remember exactly. But it’s a superior editor to Premier, imo. I use the Studio version daily.
That won’t run anything recent.
Just checked and found some mac minis 2011 i7 starting at 220 €. Think that would be the way better option.
I study after work, so I am eligable for such discounts. Good to know, thanks.