on an external 1TB hard-drive connected by a USB. This is worrying at the moment as I’m a very busy music video director and editor and need my gear as speedy as possible.

My friend bought a MacBook (not Pro) a year ago and it renders even faster than my previous computer – I don’t understand why my lovely MacBook Pro is so slow… I’ve even resorted to editing in extinct codecs like Mpeg and TIFF (with the resolutions bought down to 256 colours), disguising the quality as an intentional ‘vintage’ feel. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled FCP many times, worked with various settings and still the performance is very poor. I got FCP with it, and as soon as I tried to render very simple material with minimal FX the time was drastically slower. I’m now off to university and have invested in a standard MacBook Pro (2011) with a 2.7GHz Core i7, 4GB memory and Intel HD Graphics 3000. The render time was pretty average I’d say, but I’d be editing in codecs like H264 and exporting in maximum HD, so overall, great performance. The computer I used to work on was a standard iMac from 2007.

Apple macbook pro 2011 super slow