-
8 core or 12 core?
-
[Oliver Peters] “There are tons of plug-ins that really choke PPro regardless of the GPU.”
This is because they do not utilize the GPU by and large and therefore go through the CPU. In the future, I hope to see many more plug-in companies utilize the new ability to tap into the GPU through Premiere Pro and accelerate them.
[Oliver Peters] “Premiere really doesn’t make as much use of it as you think.”
Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. The approach is about balance. I said this back in 2010 when CS5 was out via a blog post, but I’m not going to go digging for it! 😉
CPU’s decode video and create playback. GPUs are used for FX including basic transforms such as scale (picture-in-picture), position, rotation, etc. Any Premiere Pro effect or transition that is hardware acclerated makes a big difference in total performance. This includes big things like almost all color correctors including Speedgrade LUTs. If you are doing work with very little effects work, then you’re absolutely right.
Dennis
-
Thanks, John. That’s a pretty hefty savings.
Jeremy
-
[Dennis Radeke] “This includes big things like almost all color correctors including Speedgrade LUTs”
Yikes! Really? No offense, but I’ve found the Lumetri LUTs to cause a Premiere timeline to really drop in performance. This is via the Direct Link roundtrip. Nowhere near as responsive as using Colorista II, which isn’t accelerated to my knowledge. Maybe Lumetri is only optimized for PCs or CUDA. It’s certainly sub-par on a Mac Pro with an ATI card. I’m comparing performance to FCP X with several layers of Color Board (or even the Color Grading Central LUT Utility) or Avid Symphony with real-time color correction – all on the same machine. I agree, that other Premiere Pro color effects are accelerated, but I just haven’t see it with Lumetri effects.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Very interesting in deed. Depending on your needs however, two 6-core systems would possibly fair better than this and land in the same ball-park cost. I know certain codecs scale much worse than h264 / x264. If you could do some WMV, MPEG2 and general QuickTime (ProRes, Uncompressed, possibly DV) codec tests on top of the above that would be awesome.
I wonder if we’ll see Telestremes GPU accelerated x264 codec for Episode by NAB? They’ve already released it for Vantage which is much more expensive system.
-
No, but I’ve been in contact with my Apple business rep a few times.
Did the email come from “Apple” corporate, or from your local contact? I’d imagine business reps are having to juggle a lot of anxious clients who really want their machines.
-
[Erik Lindahl] “two 6-core systems would possibly fair better than this and land in the same ball-park cost”
The thought did cross my mind. The 12 core is $3000 over the 6 core, but doubling up on CPUs means the same for Episode Engine licenses which retail for $3400. Throw in the fact that the NMP is half as rack space efficient as the Xserve, and the cost of addition fiber infrastructure, more bang per CPU is better.
With something like this… https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/store/cart.php
Replacing our 20 Xserve Episode cluster will go from under half a rack to nearly a full rack. Thankfully it will be 60% faster.
It may be possible to use two of these mounts, one facing front and another facing back, but that would require airflow up the center and out the top of the rack.
John
-
All true and sound. But I see the good scaling is in Episode Engine. I wonder how their desktop product will fair. I don’t think it scales as well due to lacking the split and stich tech. Interesting never the less.
-
“Did the email come from “Apple” corporate, or from your local contact?”
it came from Apple corporate. It’s my first mac pro so I doubt they’d actually have someone call me personally. I figure myself in the category “bonus buyers”, people who buy the mp they didn’t count on… 🙂
Hopefully I won’t have to wait till february 28th!
-
[John Heagy] “With something like this… https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/store/cart.php“
Yes! We are getting so close to JetPacPro.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up