A number of pre-purchase iMac questions

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Good evening, venerable Apple nerds. My name is Lawrence, and soon I will be one of you.

</smoke> </dramatic-entry-music> :D

I have not yet purchased an iMac, but intend to do so within the next few months. My budget will likely work out to somewhere around $1800, but I am unsure where to invest to get the best value for that money.

But first, a little bit of background information.

There are a number of reasons I am expanding my "computorial" horizons from my cozy little Linux-based world. The main factor is Apple's excellent accommodations for video editing - something which I love to do, but have not been able to indulge in for the past several years due to the loss of the only computer in my possession remotely powerful enough to deal with the high-definition AVCHD files produced by my camcorder. Another reason is my wish for a computer system that is known to the general populus - when I inform someone that I cannot do (x) because of some obscure issue with my sources.list, I always get back a confused "What?" There are several other reasons in addition to these, but they are not important. The point of this post is that I can get certain questions addressed before I take the leap and purchase the iMac of which I have been dreaming for approximately a year. :)

My questions are as follows.

1. Given my need for a system that is able to handle large high-definition video files for editing purposes, how much memory and RAM do I need? How about graphics card specifications? Also, what exactly is a graphics card, and what are memory and RAM? (I'm sorry - I'm sure it is quite obvious that I never invested much time in educating myself about computer hardware!)

2. Does the iMac natively support the FLAC audio codec?

3. Will iMovie cope well with AVCHD (.MTS) video files out-of-the-box, or do I need to convert each and every video file to MP4 or some other format before importing?

Thank you in advance for any information provided. I will update this thread with additional questions as they come to me.

Regards,

Lawrence
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
My advice without answering all your questions.... Buy the iMac you can afford with the best graphics card available and the largest hard drive you think that you'll need. You can always add memory to the iMac later on yourself as that is a very easy user upgrade.

Keep reading through our forums and all your questions will be answered. And Welcome to the Mac Forums! :)
 

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