Generally speaking, the more RAM the better.

Also, video editing is going to benefit from more RAM and SSD no matter what.

But if you had to make a choice between more RAM and an SSD, go with the SSD because the transfer rates to/from disk will make a far bigger difference in overall performance most of the time.

Not having enough RAM causes the OS to spill-over into virtual memory, which spools it to the disk. So the faster speeds that SSD offers effectively diminishes the effects of less RAM.

The line is becoming heavily blurred between RAM, disk cache, and disk storage. Over time, the cache and disk speed will become so well-tuned that it will just look like a single huge chunk of static RAM.

Depending on the software she’s using, it might also take advantage of multi-core CPUs, hyper-threading in the CPU, 64-bits, and any assistance the GPU can offer.

-David Schwartz

On Nov 30, 2017, at 8:16 AM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:

Thanks for all the great input – especially the refurbished Mac stores!

A more technical question – am I correct is assuming she needs 16 GB of RAM and a quad core i7 processor to edit 60 minutes of video footage? Or, is this over kill?

Thanks!

Mark