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Apple and Thunderbolt 3
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I’ll take that bet too.
Can see an update to the Mac Pro range before the end of q1 2017 which provides compatibility to thunderbolt 3.
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
I’m really really curious, and not at all wanting to post something that flames a huge mac/PC argument….but…… can someone with a high spec HP machine, or similar PC build give me some kind of idea of performance when working with footage that requires serious grunt. Like 6K red dragon footage or 4K red epic footage? Footage stored on an external RAID either on thunderbolt/SATA/USB3….?
Can you play it back and edit freely in Premiere/AVID?
If you are working on an old school mac pro and working in FCPX what is performance like?
How long is it taking to export a 1min sequence with no colour correction to pro res/h264/mjpeg?
I know the 2013 MP isn’t for everyone, but for the work I’ve been doing which involves footage like this it has been pretty impressive. It has some strange quirks with audio and speed exporting to h264 is not good compared with macbook pro or iMac, but I’m really intrigued to know what else I could get for my money if not a mac pro…?
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
[Tom Sefton] “can someone with a high spec HP machine, or similar PC build give me some kind of idea of performance when working with footage that requires serious grunt. Like 6K red dragon footage or 4K red epic footage?”
That’s a good question to put to the guy who wrote the article I link to below. There is a submit a comment section you can use for just that. This guy is a Mac editor working with a powerful PC for this one project involving native 6K footage.
Here is the link: https://vashivisuals.com/6-below-editing-in-6k/ -
[Robert d'Alexis] “This guy is a Mac editor working with a powerful PC for this one project involving native 6K footage.”
The GPU in his PC (nVidia Quadro M6000 12GB) costs more than my entire top-spec 2015 iMac 27. This illustrates the configuration freedom on the PC side where you can just keep throwing hardware at the task until it runs fast enough.
On the Dell web site I roughly spec’d out his 18-core Dell Precision 7910 system, and it’s about $27k. It’s hugely powerful but very expensive — well over double the price of a top-spec Mac Pro. But it’s a feature film directed by Scott Waugh and starring Josh Hartnett, so they can probably afford it.
While FCPX is generally faster than Premiere CC in areas like render performance, export, frame rate and JKL lag on H264 4k, this doesn’t matter if the job requires Premiere or Avid. They aren’t using H264 anyway. In that situation Apple is at a real disadvantage in the workstation arena, especially with the semi-closed nMP design. Toward the end of a design cycle the nMP is way behind. Maybe you don’t need that performance on FCPX but it is very much needed on Premiere and it’s very available — you just write a check, buy the workstation, and it works great.
Furthermore Adobe is making significant performance upgrades to Premiere and AE and when implemented, that high-end Dell workstation will become even faster, further opening the gap to the nMP. Apple had better get on the ball if they want to compete in the workstation area.
You could argue the total revenue from all software and hardware related to Mac Pro doesn’t warrant a continuing rapid development tempo, but that’s like saying how much total revenue does GM get from the Corvette. It’s a halo product and presence or absence of that has a knock-on effect to company image and across the entire product line.
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Maybe you don’t need that performance on FCPX but it is very much needed on Premiere and it’s very available — you just write a check, buy the workstation, and it works great.
But this is the reason for my enquiry. What performance. What is the difference? Does the $27k Dell machine allow you to playback 6k r3d files in realtime at full resolution whilst using colour effects and dissolves? How do you quantify performance if we don’t have a baseline for what a top spec PC can do with 6 or 8K footage?
For instance – I can play 6K r3d footage in FCPX at a lower quality setting. I can edit smoothly, apply a transition and finalise a cut. I can even create and edit multicam sequences that playback smooth enough. I’ve got some projects that include 40hrs of 4k r3d footage which is easily manageable.
Footage is stored on a 48TB thunderbolt 2 RAID, and the mac pro is an 8 core with 64GB of RAM. This system with a monitor and the external storage costs around £15k – nMP, monitor and raid. So my rambling question is – if you can edit and playback 6K footage with a current new mac pro, what extra does more budget give you with a PC?
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
[Tom Sefton] “So my rambling question is – if you can edit and playback 6K footage with a current new mac pro, what extra does more budget give you with a PC?”
Because you are doing this with FCPX, not Premiere CC. There can be a huge performance difference, although this varies widely by codec. Maybe a fairly high-end Dell workstation is needed (today) for Premiere to have the same performance as a nMP running FCPX on the same codec and editing tasks.
In your specific case you might be OK. But a Premiere shop might be forced to use a PC workstation, which undercuts Apple’s main goal in this product segment — selling Macs. It doesn’t matter how good FCPX is or how fast it runs on a Mac if the customers are using Premiere or Avid. They simply have to get the hardware that fulfills their performance needs, and if that takes them away from Apple, then Apple may have lost them as a customer forever. As Premiere performance further improves, this reduces the PC hardware cost to equal a Mac’s performance and makes moving off Apple even easier.
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[Tom Sefton] “For instance – I can play 6K r3d footage in FCPX at a lower quality setting. I can edit smoothly, apply a transition and finalise a cut. I can even create and edit multicam sequences that playback smooth enough. I’ve got some projects that include 40hrs of 4k r3d footage which is easily manageable.”
That’s great, a common refrain, which is why it is meaningless. Sure, you can playback that kind of footage when you’re taking shortcuts with the debayering, but when it’s all said and done, you still have to render it out, and if you’re in crunch time mode, and that smooth playback turns into a 5 hour render, that’s where things get messy. So what is the final render time like, especially with plugins added?
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[Gary Huff] “but when it’s all said and done, you still have to render it out, and if you’re in crunch time mode, and that smooth playback turns into a 5 hour render, that’s where things get messy. “
I should point out that the folks working on “Deadpool” were working on precisely that sort of thing. Complex timelines with effects and high-res media. They burned through 8-10 MPs. GPUs apparently melted. Meanwhile the “WTF” and “Hail Caesar” crews had no such issues. So when it gets to pumping the most complex stuff through the nMPs it’s a bit of a gamble. Airflow seems to be the culprit.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
For a step down to pro res (which is common due to fcpx’s blunt settings for h264 and other codecs) with 4K r3d footage we get realtime encoding or better with no effects. We tend to see 45 mins or less for a 45 min sequence.
If there is colour correction applied through colour finale or similar, along with some time remapping and text, this can raise by 30-50%.
For 6K footage, it takes 10mins for a 6min sequence with no effects.
Fcpx lacks the debayering options that premier does along with some of the finer raw controls.
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
[Oliver Peters] “I should point out that the folks working on “Deadpool” were working on precisely that sort of thing. Complex timelines with effects and high-res media. They burned through 8-10 MPs. GPUs apparently melted. Meanwhile the “WTF” and “Hail Caesar” crews had no such issues….Airflow seems to be the culprit.”
I think processing is the culprit. 🙂
That is, when I wrote in my in my Whisky Tango Foxtrot article that WTF had 1200 VFX shots vs. “only” 1500 in Deadpool, I acknowledged that these were not at all similar. The shots in WTF, and I’m assuming Caesar, were mostly roto, paint, and the like.
Not a trivial amount of human work, especially at the scale of 1200 shots…but as far as processing, yeah, pretty trivial. Might barely have touched the GPU, if at all.
Whereas Deadpool was CG-heavy. The processing power was enormous, with GPUs maxed out for long stretches. Decidedly non-trivial. LOL
Pretty much every single person reading this knows better than I do, but my guess is that there aren’t that many editing tasks that are dramatically sped up by GPUs, right?
But to Joe’s point about speccing out max iron, a Mac Pro tops out a 128 gigs of RAM and 12 cores. An HP Z840 tops out at 44 cores and 1 TERABYTE of RAM. You can, uhm, do more stuff with that, but if your work isn’t that hungry for processing power or doing math in its head, save your money — because we are talking about a lot of money.
My point earlier was just that Apple used to want to be the machine that power-hungry artists went for — at least rhetorically. I can’t imagine that Apple had any illusions about the usefulness of a 1999 G4 for 3D heavy lifting, but it was at least part of the message. The message was, Macs were so powerful they were literally dangerous.
Now, not.
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