Would the new IMac run Final Cut Pro satisfactorily?

Since the price jump to a Mac Pro is pretty major.

I just upgraded to a new 24" 2.4ghz with 4gb of Ram. The system is much faster than my old G5 dual 2.0 with 3gb of Ram. Editing is snappy and the large display is great to work with, although I have yet to calibrate it. I am very pleased with the system.

I am not planning on using the pci expansion of the MacPro, and doubt I will use a 30" display anytime soon, so it seemed like the right way to go. My only concern is with external storage.

My only concern is with external storage.

Since you have wireless N capability in your machine, why not buy the Airport Extreme and attach storage to it. Of course you also have the FW800 option now too.

-gb-

With the iMac is it possible to diasy change USB external drives to give one more storage space?

Since what are the pro's of going up to a Mac Pro?

I actually have lots of external storage - two FW800 drives, a fw400 drive, and two usb drives (about 3tb total). I edit weddings using AIC and try to keep all of my footage on the FW800 drives. I just hope the drives can keep up when I do a multicam shoot since all of the firewire drives are on the same bus. With a Mac Pro, you can use internal SATA drives and set up a raid to provide tons of quick storage without having to worry about bus speeds.

The Mac Pro offers A LOT more expansion than the all-in-one design of the iMac. The Mac Pro has 4 internal hard drive slots, room for 16GB of ram, and supports 2 optical drives.
I have a PowerPC iMac (2GHz, 1 GB RAM) and run FCP on it all the time. I have not used it to edit any HD footage, but it works fine for SD. I'm sure the new Core 2 Duo (or Core 2 Extreme!) processor will make FCP blazingly fast.

I just hope the drives can keep up when I do a multicam shoot since all of the firewire drives are on the same bus. With a Mac Pro, you can use internal SATA drives and set up a raid to provide tons of quick storage without having to worry about bus speeds.

That's a problem. If you plug the FW400 in with the FW800 drives, they will have to slow down to match the slowest device. I would have much rather seen an e-SATA connection on the new iMacs rather than FW800. Actually, I thought that when the previous iMacs started having FW800.

Again, put your USB drives on the new Airbase Extreme and you'll be okay. Might even want to look at moving the FW400 drive into a new enclosure with FW800 capability. Enclosures are dirt cheap these days.

-gb-

Excuse my ignorance but what is an Airbase Extreme?

I think he meant AirPort Extreme. It has a built in hard drive.

It this what is we're talking about?

AirPort Extreme Base Station

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=E8408794&nplm=MB053LL/A

If so would one just daisy chain USB Hard-drives to this on the iMAC to increase storage space.

I think he meant AirPort Extreme. It has a built in hard drive.

I did indeed. I have one. No, it does not have a built in hard drive. It's Apple's name for their base station/switcher. The USB allows network printers, and Network Attached Storage, making those resources available to all computers on the network.

-gb-

Would the new IMac run Final Cut Pro satisfactorily?

Since the price jump to a Mac Pro is pretty major.

I've been running the 17inch Intel iMac and FCP 5.1 all summer long with no issues at all. I "used" to be a weekend only editor (I have a full time day job, unrelated to video), but business has been so strong it's been crazy. My only complaint about this setup is render speed. 45 minutes of footage in Compressor 2 took about 2.25 hours yesterday. Also rendering for output in the timeline is slower than I'd like, but nothing I can't deal with.

Scrubbing the timeline, and play back, along with cuts and inserts are just as snappy as I need on this system. Once I take the .m2v files into DVDSP, it only takes about 15-30 minutes to burn a final project once it's designed. Again, creating menus, setting button links doesn't require a MacPro.

I've got about 750 GB on three external drives daisy chained on FW400 and haven't had any issues and 500 GB of USB 2.0 offline storage for all my Digital Juice products. Putting audio tracks and video backgrounds/video overlays into my FCP project from the USB drive hasn't been an issue. 1.5 GB RAM.

HTH,
Grant