FCPX & Motion on 2013 and 2010 MacPros – Barefeats

[Rick Lang]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Well, that’s because your give your daughters all the good toys! 😉

… You can edit compressed ProRes 4k with less than an 8 bay Raid, but you may need more capacity than 4 drives can offer over time.”

It’s worse than that. One is asking for help renovating a log cabin. You can’t buy love, but love can buy you! I think I need to change my identity and sneak back to LA.

I’ve got the Blackmagic Production Camera bug (4K raw and 4K ProRes 4:2:2 HQ); be careful, it’s contagious. I was hoping to get by with something like the Promise Pegasus2 R6 with 12 or 18 GB for some raw and ProRes. But the Areca 8-bay 8050 in TB2 may be calling me. I’m not planning on a feature film but it’s not hard to burn through a lot of space shooting raw. The RAID may wait until next year as I have other USB3 external storage to use this year as I learn what I shall need next year (when I plan to be making narrative shorts).

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Bob Woodhead]

Ordered my 6 core/D700 a couple days ago. Got the keyboard & mouse today. Tube…. March. sad. panda.

“Constituo, ergo sum”

Bob Woodhead / Atlanta
CMX-Quantel-Avid-FCP-Premiere-3D-AFX-Crayola
“What a long strange trip it’s been….”

[Tom Sefton]

We ordered 6 core and D700s just after Christmas. Shipping still says February. I might start following the postman around.

[Craig Seeman]

After seeing the Barefeats tests I’m very tempted to feel safe getting 6 Core and D500.
My gut feeling is that technology is moving so fast that in about 3 years or less I’ll be replacing it anyway.

Obviously what’s best for me isn’t necessarily good for anyone else but for my work I don’t see pushing the system extremely hard at the moment and in a couple years as 4K and HEVC take hold I suspect current system might feel a bit constrained.

The 6 Core D500 systems are available at B&H, in stock. Apparently no wait.

I’d love to see something that gives me a compelling case for the D700 so I’m hoping to see more tests. A Colorist might find a compelling reason though.

Interesting Barefeats did post a short Resolve test and FWIW it seems a MacPro with Dual G680 has the edge. They only had a D300 MacPro though and it was OK but it wouldn’t be a compelling reason to get a new Tube Tower just for grading. The 700 would have to be compelling and they well be testing an 8 Core D700 model.
https://barefeats.com/tube06.html

[Marcus Moore]

Of course, the config missing here is the one I ordered, the 8-core D700. Based on Barefeats analysis, that configuration would be better suited than the 12-core for FCPX (which according to them uses up to 8 cores) AND has a higher clock speed to boot.

But in Motion, which they say only uses 3 cores in their tests, the 4-core machine would be the best GPU to have…

It is very confusing, and I think the only way to really figure out what going on here is when barefeats could do a set of test across the matrix of all major configuration options. i.e. all 4 processors, each paired with each GPU.

[Rick Lang]

[Marcus Moore] “Of course, the config missing here is the one I ordered, the 8-core D700. Based on Barefeats analysis, that configuration would be better suited than the 12-core for FCPX (which according to them uses up to 8 cores) AND has a higher clock speed to boot.”

Marcus, when they said 8 cores, I think they meant threads.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Marcus Moore]

Based on my 30 seconds of research, each intel processor has 2 threads for each core. So a 4 core processor has 8 threads (or 8 simulated cores). And the 12core processor would have 24 threads/simulated cores.

Is that right?

So if you’re assumption is correct, a 4-core processor would use all 8 threads in FCPX rendering? But even the 6-core processor is not being fully utilized (with 2 threads being left unused).

[Marcus Moore]

This gets even more confusing. I was chatting with Philip Hodgetts, who had a loaner MacPro 12-core D700. And he swears that he saw all 12 cores being used in activity monitor (for whatever he was doing at the time). And since this is all supposed to be handled by Grand Central Dispatch, shouldn’t the maximum number of cores be being put to use whenever possible?

8 cores (or as you suggest down below) in FCPX is not optimal, but 3 in Motion (granted for OpenGL previews) is nutty.

Is it how the plugins were built (in an earlier Motion perhaps), the type of calculations they’re doing?

I think there’s going to be a VERY complicated flow chart somewhere down the line for what types of operations (playback, analysis, rendering, exporting, encoding, etc., etc…) lean on what parts of the hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD speed).

[Rick Lang]

[Marcus Moore] “Based on my 30 seconds of research, each intel processor has 2 threads for each core. So a 4 core processor has 8 threads (or 8 simulated cores). And the 12core processor would have 24 threads/simulated cores.
“

Correct. If the only thing using any significant CPU was Motion, for example, it appears Activity Monitor would show the first, third, fifth threads busy if it truly only uses three cores (presumably the GPU is also being used but I don’t know what monitors indicate what parts of the GPU are usedI.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

[Marcus Moore] “8 cores (or as you suggest down below) in FCPX is not optimal, but 3 in Motion (granted for OpenGL previews) is nutty.”

Dpn’t know what else was running when Philip saw 12 cores or 12 threads active. Grand Central Dispatch is rather complicated (to me) but it makes decisions about how to distribute work based on a number of items including the nature of the code to be executed and how it can be effectively distributed assuming the resources are available. Certainly when running the benchmark, it is unexpected that Motion would only use three threads, but as you say, we have a lot to learn. I was surprised FCP X only used 8 threads on a 12-core machine, but we’ll see how it works when more people are sharing their experience. On my quad core i7 iMac, I’ve noticed some functions use all eight threads and some use four threads, some two, some one.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB