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Which MacBook Pro for editing 4K with FCP X?
Hi everyone,
I’d like to ask for your recommendations and advice. I need to edit ‘4K’ MP4 footage from a Sony Alpha 6600 (3840 x 2160, H.264, Linear PCM, Color Profile 1-2-1). And also ‘4K’ footage from a Sony PXW 190. And I have to use FCP X.
What specs would anyone recommend for a MacBook Pro – or is there any MacBook Pro that is likely to cope without requiring proxies/transcoding?
Somewhere I read that USB 3.0 is too slow – any comments/alternative recommendations for external hard drive connections?
I’m unlikely to be doing multi-camera editing.
I’d really appreciate your advice/experiences… Preferably soon because the budget has suddenly become available and the order needs to be placed asap…
Thanks and best wishes,
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5 Replies
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If to has to be a MacBook Pro, then get the 16″ model and max out the processor, RAM and GPU, as per this screen shot:
This configuration is currently $4,499 per Apple’s website. Note the 1TB internal SSD drive.
If you also bump up the internal SSD drive to 4TB, the price goes up to $5,499.
If you want even more internal drive space, you can go up to 8TB, and the price becomes $6,699.
External storage is an option, in which case OWC has some great Thunderbolt enclosures that use M.2 SSDs. However their fastest data transfer speed for external drives is 2.8 GB/s, whereas the MacBook Pro has internal SSD speeds of up to 3.2 GB/s, which is a little faster than the OWC external storage option. (Apple notes that this speed was determined using a 4TB internal SSD, hence the note above about bumping up the internal SSD drive to 4TB.)
By contrast, if you get the 1TB configuration and then add an OWC Thunderblade external drive with 4TB, currently priced at $1,299 on OWC’s website, then you’ll pay about $5,798, about $300 more than the 4TB configuration, and the transfer speed for the external drive will be a little slower than the internal 4TB configuration.
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Thank you very much, Patrick. Is the i9 generation much better than i7? There seem to be some i7s available with 2.6 GHz…
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[pip hare] “need to edit ‘4K’ MP4 footage from a Sony Alpha 6600 (3840 x 2160, H.264, Linear PCM, Color Profile 1-2-1). And also ‘4K’ footage from a Sony PXW 190. And I have to use FCP X.
What specs would anyone recommend for a MacBook Pro – or is there any MacBook Pro that is likely to cope without requiring proxies/transcoding?”I’ve edited hundreds of camera hours of 4k XAVC-S material from Alpha cameras. It is somewhat sluggish on any NLE on any Mac platform, including Premiere 14.3.2, Resolve Studio 16.2.5 and FCPX 10.4.8. I just re-tested that on a 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro and a top-spec 2019 MacBook Pro 16. Premiere is by far the worst — major lag time for JKL commands and program monitor frame rate (even at 1/4 res) is sluggish.
In general it’s not too bad editing single-cam 4k XAVC-S using FCPX on a well-equipped 2019 MacBook Pro 16. For multi-cam you’d likely need proxies.
It is not an I/O issue and having media on the world’s fastest SSD won’t help. It is CPU-bound on the decode path, and for some reason the available accelerators such as Quick Sync, T2, etc. are not working as you might hope. At least FCPX is a little faster than Resolve and way faster than Premiere for this codec on the same Mac hardware.
For the PXW-Z190, I don’t know. Every codec is different. That camera can do 10-bit 4:2:2 XAVC-L. In general 10-bit 4:2:2 Long GOP material is harder to decode.
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Yes i9 is better because it’s generally faster and has more processing cores (the i9 has 8 cores vs. the i7’s 6 cores), hence the i9’s higher price.
Plus, what Joe said. He obviously has experience with this, so even with the upgraded MBP you may need to use proxy or optimized media (i.e. ProRes) anyway.
And the extra hard drive space that it would take to do that makes a good case for a lot of really fast SSD storage. 🙂
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Thanks Joe and Patrick!
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