How important is your graphics card when doing video editing and rendering?

I need to buy a new Mac system for video editing with Final Cut Pro. I plan to edit professional-level quality projects on this machine. An iMac is much more cheaper than the Mac Pro but the tradeoff is that you can't expand it or upgrade it's video card. The vid card it comes with is decent but I'm trying to think of the long term. So my question is, how important is a video card to doing video editing and rendering, and probably some graphics work as well. Thank you!|||well the latest apple macbooks are very good in their graphics department. i have used a mac pro (early 2010) and my macbook pro (late 2009) stands pretty good against it. video card is important when it comes to rendering the movie and the exporting depending on the size and lenght of the video you are working on. but you could get any of the macbook pros (depending on your likeness of size of the laptop and budget, the bigger they are the more stuff they have) not only because you can take the laptop anywhere but because they are very strong and durable machines. ive had mine and edited movies as long as one hour and i havent had a problem. best of luck with your decision.|||I suggest to stick to the imac and as your business build up you start up grading as well. as you have seeing technology its growing so fast that its hard to keep up ( Money wise ). I started with a imac they are great machine. know i have a G5 tower but it took some time. http://uonlinetv.com

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|||The graphics card isn't much of an issue with FCP. Any of them will be fine. The real issue is you are limiting yourself with the iMac in the display, memory, plug in cards, internal storage (fast disk access is far more important than the GPU). You will also be able to upgrade the processor in the Mac Pro to a 6-core: 3.2, 3.33 or 3.46GHz in a year or two for probably $500 or less.|||I'd like to recommend you buy macbook pro, video card is important for video editing