Mac mini and fcp

are they compatible?

The mini with the 9400m yes, I used it on mine for a little bit before I moved the system into my home theater. I'd up the ram tho to max if you can afford it.

It won't be the fastest on the block, and will require regular renders (less real time effects and concurrent video tracks), but it will work.

The previous gen models with the x3100 or gma950 is not fully supported, and it will probably not work right if at all.

Are you asking if the Mac Mini can run Final Cut Pro? If that is the case - read these specs. If your Mac Mini has these specs or better you should be fine:

Apple - Final Cut Studio 2 - Technical Specifications

basically i'm looking to buy a new mac and fcp to go with it. I called mac customer services and they said that a mac mini wouldn't run fcp but i couldn't help but feel that he wasn't being sincere and was telling me to buy an imac or mac pro for company gain. What do you guys think?
Would the lower spec be able to handle fcp? Or would i need the £649 version or would that not even be sufficient?
Can the people that have said the mini mac would be ok please confirm that they are sure of this and which spec i would need?
Thanks

I've used Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro on my Mini (and had launched some of the other apps, but didn't use them) - I don't have FCS on my mini any more now that it is my HTPC. I have a project that I primarily did on my Mac Pro still on my video drive, I'll bring it to my laptop (similar capability as the mini - faster processor then the mini but less ram, 9400m, my laptop has no firewire so it will be slower overall for me) on Monday and I can test for you:

Motion (I will open a project I had created, scrub through it, have motion render and output it to a video file)
Compressor (I will open a HD video clip (short one) and convert it to another format, either mpeg2+ac3 or mp4)
Final Cut Pro I know already works (I did not test all fxplug plugins)
DVD Studio Pro I know already works
Soundtrack (I will open, create a new project, mess around with the various audio tools)
I can launch Color, but I have no idea how to use it properly, but I will try to load a clip and mess with its color and export it back out.

I would test it on my mini, but it takes forever to do a full install of FCS2 (it's 56 gigs with everything installed, not including the additional time to download the patches) plus my video drive is at work atm.

The 9400m is a very different graphics chipset then the intel GMA. I will be happy to confirm functionality to what I can use it for on Monday.

Keep in mind Final Cut Studio 3 that will come out probably within the next 6 months to a year may not function on the 9400m chip properly, so that may be a deciding factor for you. For me it isn't as unless it is just so awesome I can't avoid upgrading, I plan to continue to use FCS2.

excellent, looking forward to your post

Report back on tests:

System used: Unibody Macbook 2.4GHz, 2Gig Ram, 9400M integrated GPU w/ 256M ram shared with system. 13" Screen, using external 1280x1024 screen. Video drive connected via USB.


1) Motion: Opened existing motion project. Project is a 1080i60 format using 15 still photos. The project is a 3D project with photos scaled to different sizes and at different distances from a single plane. Camera is offset at an angle from the photos to create a somewhat flyby effect. Background is a still image. Total length: 390 frames. Scrubs through fine. Rendered to .mov fine (took a few minutes). Checked different views and had on the screen at the same time 3 views: top, Front, Active camera. Program appeared to work fine for my test.

2) Final Cut Pro: I have already used FCP before on the machine, so I know it works. I used it briefly on this test to be able to use Color. Loaded motion file and placed on the timeline. Once on the timeline, used Send to to send it to Color. Later received back from Color to check again.

3) Compressor: Took the motion export (.mov file, 1080i60), and converted it to a mp4 720p file. Took a few minutes to convert, but the new mp4 played fine. It did push the cpu temp high, but did not cause any system issues in terms of stability.

4) Color: Using file transfered from FCP, I scrubbed the video a little. Added a "film effect", rendered the video and sent it back to FCP. I did try a few color adjustments too, but I really don't know what I'm doing with the software. All of the plot graphs seemed to update and play correctly while the video was being played or scrubbed through. This program requires A LOT of screen real-estate. On the 1280x1024 screen some of the text was near impossible to read because it was so small. If using color, I'd recommend at least a 1680x1050 or higher rez screen (or multiple screens) to see it clearly. I know at home on my 20" 1680x1050, color is easier to see/read.

5) Soundtrack: Created a new project, selected a music loop in one track, added a magazine load into a gun, slide pull/load a round (ie: semiauto handgun), 2x silencer shots w/ 2 shell casings hitting concrete. Total use of 4 tracks (music on 1, magazine, slide, shots on 2, shells on 3 and 4 (for overlap timing)). Exported clip to mp3, worked fine.

6) DVD Studio Pro: Already tested in the past. I know I can create a DVD, add menus content, build and format the dvd just fine.

I can confirm for basic work, Final Cut Studio will work on a machine with a 9400m GPU. I have not tested EVERY feature, but everything I have done has been using HD footage.

Notes:

* Some things will push the cpu up to near 100% usage (compressor used the most cpu power during conversion, most other items had a more distributed spike graph where it would be low then high then medium, etc.) Monitoring of CPU usage and temperature was through iStats. iStats will show all core activity and various temp info.

* Better performance probably would have been obtained if I had more RAM. This machine only has 2Gigs, of which 256Megs is tied into the graphics which only leaves 1.75 Gigs for applications - this makes it a definite challenge to have multiple FCS apps open when dealing with HD video. If I had 4 Gig I feel it would perform better.

* It is definitely slower then a Mac Pro (comparing to my early '08 octo core), but it does work, and it works fairly well (except color which might partially be because I don't understand how to use it). A lot more requires rendering to display rather then real time effects (transitions and video effects in FCP - when you go to select them from the bins, it makes ones that can be done in realtime stand out in bold - there are a lot less bold options on my laptop then on my mac pro - anything not in bold, or even in bold but when placed shows red, will require a render (this isn't a big deal if you render often, but if you wait until you have like 40 things done you may find rendering takes a while).

* Performance would be better if I was working with SD video. This test was all done with 1080i60 HD, so although a short test, it is significantly more system intensive then a similar length test would be in SD.

* Performance would have been better if I had firewire on my Macbook. The Mac Mini you're looking at getting has a FW800 port - if you use that for your video data scratch drive you should get fairly good performance out of it compared to using a USB connection to do video work.

* The Macbook I have does have a bit of a faster processor, but for a lot of what I was doing I didn't see a lot of pegged CPU usage (except in compressor and when doing a few things in motion; color used around 60% during rendering)

* When I refer to CPU usage, I think I should have been more clear - if I say 90% cpu, I'm referring to 90% on EACH CORE.

* The mini and my Macbook are near identical in capability. My Macbook has a faster CPU, but that's really it.

* You will want, if you can afford it, to upgrade your mini to 4Gig.

* All tests done were done with Final Cut Studio 2. Functionality of FCS2 DOES NOT guarantee that when FCS3 comes out that it will still work on the same hardware.

* This test only refers to systems with the 9400m graphics chipset based Macs, and NOT the intel GMA based systems which may not work at all. Also note I did not test EVERY feature of the software tools, but I have used transitions, color adjustments within fcp (using a color video effect adjustment - not that actual Color program), exports, imports, conversion of AVCHD footage, capturing of SD footage via firewire (on my mini before it moved to a different function in my house), etc.

I hope this helps!

That has helped a lot, thanks. How much to upgrade to 4gig?
Would it be able to cope with after effects as well?

Upgrading to 4 gig isn't terribly expensive, if you take a look at apples store online and do a custom config to 4 gigs, it'll tell you. I can't say off hand because of the fact I work for a school, my total price as lower due to educational discounts...

In terms of After Effects, I can't comment - I don't own it for OSX. If its system requirements fall within what the mini has, it should work.