Specifications

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DAVINCI RESOLVE FOR MAC - CERTIFIED CONFIGURATION GUIDE
The late 2012 27" iMac provides a flexible and
simple desktop workhorse for real time previewing,
grading and finishing material up to and including
HD. It can also provide a good platform to review
and grade higher resolution than HD images which
you can render at slower than real time in the iMac.
Alternatively use it as a grading station, then move
the project to a faster hardware platform such as the
MacPro for rendering.
As this iMac utilizes a NVIDIA CUDA GPU it can
provide faster image processing than previous
models. It's important to use the model with 2GB or
more of GPU memory.
Performance of the previous model iMacs will be
lower than the 2012 27"iMac due not only to the CPU
but also the GPU type used in those models.
As with other Resolve configurations, the Resolve
on iMac benefits from being used with the DaVinci
Resolve Control Surface but can also be used with
any of the certified third party control panels.
All compressed files, i ncluding A pple ProRes and
RED R3D, are decompressed by the CPU prior to
image processing by the GPU. If you are mainly
working with compressed files, c onsider u sing a n
iMac with faster CPUs so that real time grading is not
impeded by slow CPUs.
A Thunderbolt disk array provides fast, high capacity
disk storage for this iMac and is recommended.
Setup
The Resolve interface requires a high GUI resolution,
which is available on the 21.5” and 27” late 2012
iMacs without user intervention.
Building a DaVinci Resolve on a 2012 iMac is
the simplest of configurations. Just install the
application, panels, media drive, verify your GPU
drivers and start grading.
The most important item to check if you are
installing DaVinci Resolve on an older Mac is to
confirm you are using the 64bit kernel, not 32bit.
You can check your system by using information
from this Apple support page: http://support.apple.
com/kb/HT3770 and switch your system to use the
64bit kernel if its currently on 32bit with information
on this Apple support page: http://support.apple.
com/ kb/HT3773
DaVinci Resolve on iMac
Suitable for HD and higher resolutions
3 Real time processing of HD images
3 Preview, grade and render 4K images
3 Grading monitor and external storage via Thunderbolt
™