Is The Macbook Pro 2012 Still Worth It in 2019? Video Editing Edition

Hello everyone, my name is Mike, welcome to Tech Car Moon and on this channel we talk about technology and camera equipment, and today I'm going to talk about whether the

2012

MacBook will

still

be up to par in

2019

, let's get into it, shall we? and? More or less with the addition of the new MacBooks that are coming out, as well as the MacBook Airs and all that, math book prices have never been higher and that goes for the entire range, so MacBook people Air and MacBook Pro, so if you're a beginner

video

grapher or filmmaker, you might be thinking: if I'm going to shoot in 4k, which is what a lot of clients want to see these days, can I afford to not just get the equipment of the camera, but also the lighting of all this? other things we talk about on this channel, but also how I'm going to edit it, because these matte books are not cheap.

You know, to get something halfway decent you have to spend around £1500, which is a lot of money, especially on top of everything else you've bought, so I wanted to know if a relatively mid-spec

2012

MacBook Pro, the mid-spec MacBook Pros Mid 2012 will really be right up there with

2019

for K Video Editor, so as you can see the specs on this are very, very reasonable. So if we take a look at the specifications of this Mac, as you can see, we have the latest Mac OS Mojave. This is a 13-inch MacBook Pro from mid-2012. We also have a 2.5 gigahertz Intel Core i5 processor.

This processor is a very normal processor that you would have found in this line again. You could have gone for a much higher spec i7, but just for this purpose I wanted to go with the i-5 because this is the one you primarily use. We also have 8 gigabytes of DDR3 memory on the market, as well as Intel HD graphics in the thousands. This one has integrated graphics so it's nothing fantastic, it doesn't have a dedicated GPU so it will be really interesting to see what comes out of this MacBook, so now if we take a look at the built-in display, this is a very basic, so this one has a 13.3-inch screen, that is, 1280 by 800 pixels, so this screen is very basic.

It's nothing like the new MacBooks we find on the market today, however, I

still

think you can edit this and just to let you know, I've been

editing

this for about six months so I know these MacBooks can withstand the proof. of time, but I just want to show you and as you can see, we also have eight gigabytes of RAM, so we have two full memory slots, both with four gigabytes, which makes us take advantage of the dual channel memory, so we should find much better speeds than just having a single eight gigabyte RAM, so why am I talking about the 2012 MacBook Pro model instead of any of the other older models?

The reason is because this is the last model where you can upgrade both the RAM as well as the HDD for me, for example I actually removed the optical disc drive to replace it with another SSD in terms of the specifications I changed on this computer. I've upgraded the ramp to eight gigabytes, now these map books are actually configurable. up to 16 gigabytes which is something I may do in the future but for now aigoo bits actually works perfectly and to be honest this is probably a spec upgrade that you guys will probably do yourselves because to find 2 units of 4 RAM gigabytes can find They are very, very cheap.

I'll put a link in the description below. They'll be affiliated, so if you buy them, they'll give me a little kickback at no extra cost to you now that you buy these 2012 MacBook Pros, both of them. The things I would recommend you upgrade are firstly the RAM and upgrading the drive to an SSD, this will give you much faster speeds and make it much easier to edit and play back images in 4k and to show you I'll show you. right now, so let's jump into Edit and we'll open Final Cut Pro. Now we have these screen recordings in the background, so obviously it's going to take a little bit longer, but as you can see, it opened very very quickly now we're going to create a new project, we'll just leave it untitled or save it and then import some media, so we'll take, say, this footage here, import it, and then start a new project so you can I can see just in the project timeline that we have 4k 3840 for 2160 and that's at 24 P and we're going to render it in Apple ProRes 4 to 2, so press ok on those, we'll drag this into our timeline. and let's see how it plays so you can see there are no drops in frame rate.

I just turned the sound down so you guys don't have to hear me talk behind it, but yeah, the playback is absolutely fine, now just put a rating on it and we'll see how it works, so we'll extend that rating and then we'll go in here, we'll go in one of my presets, which is this one. I'm right here. apply it to the footage and in a few seconds and that's it, obviously I'll modify it a little bit, but again, if we play it at that high grade, we've seen a couple of dropped frames, but we can still play it. absolutely fine and this is in full 4k resolution and we haven't done any proxy media or anything like that.

I just took it straight from the SD card to the actual computer as you can see on the 2012 MacBook we can actually play 4k in Final Cut Pro so this is awesome because what that means is you can buy a MacBook Pro for about £3 to £350 through some upgrades that won't cost you more than about £100 so for about £400 to £450 you can have a 4k

editing

machine now just so you know with multicam it drops frames but if you're doing a very simple edit for YouTube, get yourself one of these, don't spend £1500 if you're just starting to shop.

One of these, customize it in Final Cut Pro. You can edit footage in 4k, as you can see. I also put a lot in there, a very heavy classifier. I think it had like two or three nuts, plus a color grading. it looks horrible but as you can see it actually played it, dropped a couple of frames to start with and then played it absolutely fine, so those people who say you need a very powerful machine to edit in 4k that's absolute nonsense, now what? What are the disadvantages of editing with such an old machine? Well, when you export, the export times are extremely long, but if you're just starting out on YouTube or just starting to make movies, I don't think this is going to be a big task.

The problem because you are going to edit is mainly the editing process, as long as you can edit it without it moving too much. I think you can create some really amazing

video

s and just when you're exporting, just have a little patience, what's my? verdict on the 2012 MacBook Pro in 2019. I think if you're thinking about getting one of these, you'll be in good hands. There are two upgrades, as I mentioned, that you need to do and that is upgrading to an SSD, which is the first one. What I definitely recommend you do, the second thing is to upgrade the RAM, either to 8 or 12 gigs, but as you saw, I was editing that footage in 4k with 8 gigabytes of RAM, so 16 will only do a little better than the other.

The downside to editing on a 2012 MacBook Pro is the screen, obviously we don't have that beautiful HDR wide color gamut screen, so in terms of color grading it will obviously make it a little more difficult, however for the editing stuff YouTube is not. If you have any problems just put it there, you'll get about 90% there and then you can fix it all on another monitor if you want. The other disadvantage of the MacBook Pro 2012 in 2019 is the weight, heft, and size of it. This is a little ridiculous in 2019, this is a heavy laptop nowadays and also the thickness of this, I mean, it's not ridiculous, but I mean, when you look at the new Mavericks, it's night and day, but if you're looking get a cheap

macbook

this is absolutely fantastic, it still works in 2019, it still edits 4k images in 2019 so any multitasking will be absolutely fine.

I think it will be very difficult to find a new laptop even at this price. point you can edit in 4k so easily now I know in Premiere you will have a hard time editing in 4k with this and I have also noticed that editing with DaVinci Resolve on this laptop doesn't work either so if you want to edit in Premiere or DaVinci Resolve , I would recommend that you avoid this or transcode your footage or use proxies so basically play your footage a little better if you are going to edit on a machine like this invest in one of these as well as Final Cut Pro because Final Cut Pro weighs only around £300 per lifetime, so you get lifetime updates with that or until it's released or a major update in terms of the next Final Cut, so for a budget package, full editing package, you can know that the software will stay with you and then when you're ready to update you can update it, but carrying one of these has been difficult, it takes up a lot of space in my bag.

I can definitely feel it along with the whole camera. equipment I obviously use a lot of Micro Four Thirds mirrorless cameras as well as camera gear, and they're all very light and it's almost a compensation for the fact that I have to carry this around. If you liked the video, please leave a thumbs up if you haven't already, subscribe, but until the next video take care and I'll see you next bite.