New iMac and FCPX

We have un-boxed our new addition to the family... a refurbished 27" 2.9Ghz iMac! It is really exciting for us because our software updates are having difficulties on our old iMac and this makes everything else a bother. This is the only real gripe I have with Apple... that they discontinue support in order to force their customers to upgrade. I agree that it is necessary eventually, but not so fast. I think they should give you a good 5-8 years especially since Macs are more expensive. Of course, the thing that makes up for this (there are actually a lot of things that make up for Mac issues) is that the resale value is high on a Mac, so you do pay the initially large cost, but then you get it back when you sell, which helps the upgrade costs to be not as bad next time.

We will need to merge our files onto the new iMac properly and clean up our file structure to make way for a new clean start- and this will take time. I did not order the flagship 3.2Ghz iMac but instead the next to the best. I had read online about some benchmark tests comparing the two and the 2.9Ghz was actually stacking up quite well to the 3.2. Many people don't realize that higher numbers does not always mean better, but this was also great for us because of the cost savings. So we are going from a five year old iMac with a 24" to a brand new 27" and I am so very pleased! I am now planning on upgrading every two or three years instead of waiting for issues to crop up. That should work better.

Along with this, we will also be getting FCPX soon and getting away from the old FCP 6 we've been using forever. It has worked for us for so long and we will be sad to see it go, but it's about that time. We will have Premier in case we can't get it to work just right at first. So hopefully the learning curve shouldn't hurt too much. I have heard that FCPX has fixed a lot of it's issues, including monitoring, Multi-cam, and file merging with old FCP project files can be done now as well with a plugin (I believe). This means a lot to me so we can stay up to date & get back to making films! And yes, it is incredibly slim and a gorgeous piece of machinery! ;)