Buying New Mac for Freelance Project – MBP Retina or iMac?

[Rick Lang]

Jake, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” One could be forgiven if one expected a new iMac in October 2012. But no guarantee. And wouldn’t that be too late to be useful for your project beginning in September?

Your plan re the rMBP may be better given the machine exists and others on the Creative Cow seem happy with it. One advantage of the rMBP is the GPU is from NVIDIA and includes CUDA support; that can improve performance for some graphics uses. There’s no guarantee even a refreshed iMac will support CUDA although it may. The alternative of moving to an existing iMac is there but in two months you may have buyer’s remorse if indeed the refreshed iMac is imminent. You know what is best for you.

The reimagined Mac Pro that Tim Cook mentioned would need to wait for 2013 is not a guarantee either in terms of what specs it will have or if it’s affordable for you. If it happens and you love it, great sell what you buy this year. But I’d recommend you buy something you’re going to be happy with just in case you eventually decide to keep it longer than you’re planning.

It may come down to the form factor of the rMBP versus the iMac since both are fairly closed boxes in terms of upgrade ability. I use a 27″ iMac and like having the larger screen size. But the 15″ rMBP has a higher resolution screen than the 27″ iMac. Of course that higher resolution may not be totally useable depending upon how you use it with FCPX. There is a sweet configuration for the rMBP that will give you a true 1929×1080 HD display of your video as you are editing it within FCPX so that is appealing.

Hope these thoughts help but your decision.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Jake Keller]

Thanks for the reply Rick. Very helpful response since it helped me with thinking about it more so. Also, I was unaware that the 650M in the rMBP supported CUDA, and this is a huge selling point for the future.

A larger iMac screen does sound appealing, but I do think I would have buyer’s remorse this year, strictly due to the upgraded CPU’s (Ivy Bridge) coming with the iMac refresh. The 1080p playback is definitely worthwhile, and I think while working on the project I’ll set my viewer to the rMBP display for doing color correction while using my samsung px2370 as the primary monitor. The other way around will be fine too for cutting on the timeline. I don’t know if this is possible, but we could use the rMBP display as our on-site monitor through connecting HDMI (mk3) to HDMI (rMBP). Never tried something like that before ever. Anyone tried this yet? Also, doing data and dumping footage on location will be beneficial as well.

Well, you’ve helped me solidify a decision and I think I’ll be happy with the rMBP until the supposed iMac refresh. This way, if I do sell the rMBP I’ll probably be able to pay off the iMac and keep a little of the remaining money for upgrades/accessories too. It might be hard to part with the display though after looking at it for so long :p

Thanks so much for your suggestions and thought-provoking advice.

-Jake

[Rick Lang]

Very good. I believe you can use either screen as a monitor within FCPX but it will be very nice to get the full 1920×1080 HD window running on the retina 2880×1800 screen. I don’t know if the HDMI port allows input of a signal from a other source or if is only enabled for HDMI output from the laptop. Call Apple to verify.

You can also run dual displays with the retina screen and your Samsung LED screen (as I do from my iMac). Nice to have extra screen real estate and an easy way to display HD images in their actual size. Good luck with your purchase and your video project.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Jake Keller]

Yes, I’m pretty excited to check it out after messing around with it at the store for a bit. If I don’t sell and get the iMac, I’ll be grabbing up one of the retina Cinema Displays when they decide to show up, but any LED monitor like my Samsung is fine for now.

One thing that dawned on me though is a Thunderbolt drive vs. the internal SSD and what to edit off of. I’m not sure about the technicalities, but I know editing off of your internal is bad because it has to defrag the information and depending on the size of your material you will want a faster read/write speed. Is this the same with SSD’s, or can I edit right off of the internal drive? Otherwise, I’m thinking of buying one of the La Cie little big disks, though they’re quite expensive.

However, the starting 256gb is a small amount of space too so I would need to upgrade to 512gb, partition the SSD, and then edit off one of the partitions. I read its more stable to work off of multiple internal drives instead of just your boot drive. The SSD upgrade is $500 to 512gb and the la cie thunderbolt is $399 @ 1TB, but it’s not an SSD. Hm. I guess more space vs. faster performance is the question here haha. Sorry for prolonging the conversation, but I want to make sure I’m on the right page as technology continues to advance here.

Thanks again for your help. I’m eager to optimize my workflow with the new tools and organization in FCPX. So far, using it on a current project at work has proved to be great.

-Jake

[Rick Lang]

If you can afford to, maximize the memory to 16 GB, maximize the GPU if there’s an option for more GDDR5 memory, get the biggest internal SSD you can justify financially. Certainly the 512GB internal SSD is going to give your machine a longer useful life.

SSDs are not like hard disks in that they don’t require any defragging by you. The internal SSD controller in the drive itself takes care of this itself (helped by the TRIM feature). Even partitioning an SSD may be just for your logical convenience as it may make no physical difference to the SSD performance. Do not fill an SSD to it’s maximum capacity. The rule of thumb for any system drive is to allow 10% room and you want to perhaps even increase that for your SSD as it needs free space to manage your data behind the scene. If you ever have an external SSD, you still need to ensure it has some breathing room on any device that says its capacity is 128 or 256 or 512GB. If the SSD says it’s capacity is 120 or 240 or 480GB, the drive is setting aside about 6% of its real capacity for that internal data management so you could safely fill them closer to the stated capacity. Hope you follow what I mean.

Depending upon the size of your FCPX projects and how many you work on concurrently, you may be able to get away with using the internal SSD for both the operating system, your normal stuff, and your media. At least for a while and later you can buy an external drive for editing and archiving. Even though you have two Thunderbolt ports, be sure to buy only external desktop drives that have two Thunderbolt ports so they can be part of a daisy-chain of TB/DisplayPort devices. Shame on the vendors that don’t include a pass-through TB connection on their devices. Remember you also have two USB 3 drive ports so there is that option for archiving/backups as well as possibly for audio/visual editing.

Did I cover everything? I try to maximize the configuration because you can’t upgrade it yourself later. I don’t think you’ll sell the machine anytime soon so enjoy!

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB