FCP-X plus new MacPro = 16 track Multicam of 4k footage? Really??.

[Marcus Moore]

This kind of combative discourse isn’t helpful for anyone. If FCPX users get their back up now and start getting all high and mighty- it’s only doing to drive prospective users away.

I love using X, but I see loads of ways for it to improve. Hopefully some of those will be coming in December.

[Marcus Moore]

I can’t see it being near that much. I’m thinking closer to 8K, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

[Chris Harlan]

[Marcus Moore] “I can’t see it being near that much. I’m thinking closer to 8K, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
“

I can’t quite imagine that, with the cost of the upper end GPUs and a 12 core, and 64 gigs of RAM. I think it has to be between 13 and 17.

This guy does a nice cost break down, which I largely agree with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxMRARm2ME

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[Walter Soyka]

[Andrew Kimery] “Any guess why Apple mentions 3 streams of 4K in place but 16 streams in another?”

Wild, crazy, speculative and unsubstantiated guess: they can push 3 streams of full 4K through the normal rendering pipeline (key, color, transform, crop, distort, composite) in real time at full res, but multicam clips are scaled down before processing?

Or someone in PR made a mistake somewhere?

Another couple months and we’ll know for sure, I guess.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Marcus Moore]

Well, let’s give it the old college try-

$2,999: 4-core, 12GB RAM, 256GB HD, and 2xD300

for another $1,000 you move up RAM, one CPU, and one GPU class-

$3,999: 6-core, 16GB RAM, 256GB HD, and 2xD500

RAM: for the iMac, it costs $600 to install 64GB. I’m sure the 16GB sticks will cost more, so lets’ say maxing out the RAM (thru Apple) would cost you $2,000.

SSD: Adding a 512TB SSD to the iMac costs $500. I think this will be pretty price comparable.

GPU: That architosh article pegs the cost of each D700 at about $3,158. In their calculations, Apple seems to be charging less for the MacPro GPUs than that. Certainly, Apple MUST be getting some kind of deal here. The architosh pegs the D500s at $1,308; yet 2 of them are going into the $3,999 machine for only $1,000 MORE than the D300s in the base model. How much of a discount we’re getting is unclear, but based on the price of the D500s relative to the base model, lets say the upgrade price to the D700 will be $3,500 (the price of one- same as the D500).

CPU: Doing some hunting, I’ve found a prospective price on the CPUs. 6-core is $600, 8-core is $1700, 12-core is $2,614.

Again, if you look at the fact that the price different between the 3K and 4K machine includes both a CPU and GPU upgrade, they’ve got to be getting great volume pricing on these things. So the pricing isn’t going to be strictly additive.

So let’s take the base machine price- $2,999.

$500 SSD HD
$2,000 RAM
$4,000 GPU (to be a bit pessimistic)
$1,500 CPU

TOTAL- $11,000. If my figures make any sense. More than I thought, but I might be high in some areas and low in others. Very difficult to say with any certainty.

[Oliver Peters]

[Walter Soyka] “Wild, crazy, speculative and unsubstantiated guess: they can push 3 streams of full 4K through the normal rendering pipeline (key, color, transform, crop, distort, composite) in real time at full res, but multicam clips are scaled down before processing?”

I think you guys have it wrong. There are 2 GPUs. Essentially one handles connected displays and one handles processing. So the 3 x 4K streams most likely refers to 3 computer displays. This still leaves room for the second processor handling real-time effects in FCP X. Even full-res 4K files could be sliced like RED files are sliced in order to stick up a 16-way split to the multi-angle viewer. At this point, it’s more a factor of disk i/o.

My bet is that it’s not all that cut and dried. Most likely if you are hanging 3 x 4K displays off the machine, you will have difficulty also running 16 x 4K video streams. At least on the 4-core or 6-core base machines.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Chris Harlan]

[Marcus Moore] “TOTAL- $11,000. If my figures make any sense. More than I thought, but I might be high in some areas and low in others. Very difficult to say with any certainty.
“

I agree that they might be able to offer it for 11 or 12, if they were inclined to, but I’ve never known Apple not to charge a premium for everything from RAM to GPUs. Their higher end Mac Pros have always been relatively expensive compared to the cost of components. So, while they might be able to accomplish it, I will be surprised–albeit pleasantly–if they do. Gentleman’s bet, then, eh?

[Marcus Moore]

True enough. Though it’s exactly the disparity between what the bump in CPU and GPU from the 3K to 4K model SHOULD cost from the prices I’ve found, vs the $1,000 price difference that has me confused about where actual price will drop.

See you back here in a month, I guess!

[Walter Soyka]

[Oliver Peters] “I think you guys have it wrong.”

Totally possible. I disclaimed my guess as wild, crazy, speculative, and unsubstantiated on purpose 🙂

[Oliver Peters] “There are 2 GPUs. Essentially one handles connected displays and one handles processing.”

I wouldn’t be so sure of that — if one were dedicated to display and one to processing, it’d be an enormous waste for the display GPU to have so much GPGPU horsepower.

I believe that the load will be distributed; otherwise, an asymmetric GPU system like Resolve configs feature would make a lot more sense.

[Oliver Peters] “So the 3 x 4K streams most likely refers to 3 computer displays.”

Here’s the quote from the Apple mini-site [link]:

“Work pixel-for-pixel in 4K without slowing down, thanks to dual AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs and the latest Xeon E5 processors in Mac Pro — a merger that delivers the breathtaking capability to run three streams of 4K video at once (or many more streams of HD video). Combine that with the power to drive up to three 4K displays, process effects in real time, and even edit 4K multicam clips, and you have a video editing powerhouse.”

We know from here that this system can drive up to three 4K displays; but if “the breathtaking capability to run three streams of 4K video at once” is something different, it’s quite poorly written — which is why my alternative theory is a confused agency.

[Oliver Peters] “My bet is that it’s not all that cut and dried. Most likely if you are hanging 3 x 4K displays off the machine, you will have difficulty also running 16 x 4K video streams. At least on the 4-core or 6-core base machines.”

That makes a lot of sense.

I think it’s worth reiterating that we are constantly talking here about the price of the low-spec systems, but the performance of the absolute highest-spec system.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Chris Harlan]

[Walter Soyka] “I think it’s worth reiterating that we are constantly talking here about the price of the low-spec systems, but the performance of the absolute highest-spec system.
“

Indeed.