imac 27" i5 3.1 video editing question

Hi I'm new here so please bear with me. (Apologies I realise that this question is now in the wrong area.)

Please can somebody clear this up for me. I initially wanted to buy the base imac 2.7ghz i5 AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 512M and run Photoshop CS5 for photo editing. (Im just getting started in photography.)

After extensive research I have been told by many mac experts in retail shops that this will be sufficient, yet obviously its best to upgrade ram in the future.

I then thought that I might want to get into video editing in the future so I am now considering the i5 3.1ghz AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 1GB instead.

However somebody said on a Yahoo questions forum that for them, the i5 is slow for video editing so they went and bought an i7. ( I know I read to many opinions and everyone says something different).

My question is will the i5 3.1ghz with the upgraded 6970m graphics card be sufficient for video editing?

Ultimately I want the best that I could afford, so Id be disappointed if I found out that I couldn't do anything advanced in the future because my imac didn't have the necessary spec for certain actions.

Thanks.

Your question is OK right here.... no problem.

My advice is to buy the best iMac you can reasonably afford. Keep in mind that you can not upgrade the graphics capability of the machine once you purchase it. If you can afford the better graphics card with 1 GB of VRAM, then that's what you should purchase. Same advice for the CPU as it too can not be upgraded later on.

Also consider the size of the hard drive... while changing out a hard drive in an iMac is doable, it's a challenging task and probably best left to a service technician. About the only upgrade I would recommend doing yourself is memory additions. Adding memory to an iMac is an easy do it yourself project and currently, memory is inexpensive.

EDIT: I just noticed you cross posted this again to another forum. Please only post to one forum and continue the thread in the same forum. Cross posting causes confusion and multiple unnecessary replies. Thanks. (I removed the cross post.)

That's a tough one to answer with the info provided. On what level do you want to get into video editing?

Are we talking' thrown' some vacation footage and photos into a little iMovie project to burn to DVD and share with your friends, or are we talking' 8 camera multi-clips in FCP loaded up with keyframes?

If you're looking at the iMovie scenario, any iMac they sell will be fine.

If you're looking at the FCP scenario, buy everything you can afford.

As far as hard drive space goes, I think most video editors have come to grips with the fact that they're going to need external drives for storage anyway, so you might as well start out that way.