The 2012 MacBook Pros have USB 3.0 so at least you don't have the problem caused by slow USB 2.0 ports. You could move your media to the Touro drive and see if this helps.

The HGST Touro S 7200 rpm USB 3 drive is quite good for a bus-powered drive but it's not equal to an AC-powered 3.5' external drive. That said, it is good practice to have your media on a different drive than your boot drive. Using proxy media greatly reduces the CPU burden. So you want good I/O performance but if you are already bottlenecked on the CPU then infinitely fast I/O won't help. However editing itself, rendering the timeline (minus effects) and exporting (ie encoding) to a file are typically CPU bound operations. It is generally CPU bound and effects often use the GPU. In most cases editing H264 content (even 4K) is not extremely I/O bound due to the compressed nature. Before final export to a file, change viewer back to 'optimized/original', else output will be in proxy resolution Do not select 'optimized', since that will take up too much space in your specific situation. In upper-right corner of viewer, click drop down triangle and select 'Proxy'. Right-click, select 'transcode media', then pick 'Create proxy media' This will yield a major editing speed improvement and doesn't cost anything. Since FCPX has seamless, built-in proxy support, your best approach is transcode to proxy on either import or afterward. It's an integrated Intel Graphics card which isn't much, but I hear a lot about external video seems like I could put those funds in getting a solid desktop or laptop, but then I couldn't work with FCPX which leaves me in a rut.ĤK can be challenging to edit on even higher end machines.

would that help ease the macbook's strain by editing through the drive?. Been working with a Macbook Pro 2012.while it does a decent job for smaller 4k projects, bigger files will slow the hardware down and sometimes crash.Īll I've done is upgrade my ram from 8 to 16gb.I have an external Touro drive running at 7200rpm but I honestly barely use it.

Best ssd for macbook pro 2012