FCPX on 5K iMac

[Lance Bachelder]

Nice to know about the iMac. I’m currently on a similar 2009 Mac Pro 8 core with SSD and 7950. It’s just okay. Can’t wait to try out the iMac.

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Ryan Holmes]

[Jeremy Garchow] “heyyyy-ooooo”

Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitress! 🙂

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Steve Connor]

[Lance Bachelder] “Nice to know about the iMac. I’m currently on a similar 2009 Mac Pro 8 core with SSD and 7950. It’s just okay. Can’t wait to try out the iMac.”

Don’t try it until you can actually get one, it’s very depressing going back! going to put my order in next week.

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Connor] “2008 8 core Mac Pro with SSD drive, G-Tech SATA and Radeon 7950, which I know is less than ideal, But I also use an i7 2013 MBP and the 5K felt considerably faster”

I am also editing on a 2008 2.8 Ghz 8-core Mac Pro with SSD and Radeon HD 5870 and I was considering buying a used 2010 2.93 Ghz 12-core Mac Pro on eBay which are going for about $2500 which is the base price on the iMac 5K. Are you saying I should consider the iMac 5K instead? (I also have a Mid-2012 MBP)

Do you know the specs of the iMac 5K you were editing with? Was it a base model? (which is only a Core i5) or did it have upgrades? When you add the 4.0Ghz Core i7, 32GB memory, and Radeon R9 M295X the price jumps $1100 to $3600. I guess I could get only 16GB of memory for $3200.

Since we’re both coming from a 2008 8-Core Mac Pro, I guess what I’m asking is between a 2010 12-Core Mac Pro and the iMac 5K which would you get for FCP X work?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Connor]

I’d go with the iMac, FCP X seems to be optimised for the newer Intel chips, I’ve used a 12 core and it didn’t match the iMac for editing tasks, the one benefit to the 12 core is that I imagine renders will be faster, although having said that when I rendered some .h264 files from the iMac it seemed pretty quick.

The one I used was an i7 with the 4GB graphics card and only 16GB RAM

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Connor] “I’ve used a 12 core and it didn’t match the iMac for editing tasks, the one benefit to the 12 core is that I imagine renders will be faster, although having said that when I rendered some .h264 files from the iMac it seemed pretty quick.”

I’m primarily concerned with speed of editing and not so much with rendering time. If you’re saying that the 12 core didn’t match the iMac for editing then I really have some re-thinking to do.

[Steve Connor] “The one I used was an i7 with the 4GB graphics card and only 16GB RAM”

Perfect! That’s $3200… something to definitely consider. Thanks Steve!

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Ryan Holmes]

[John Rofrano] “Since we’re both coming from a 2008 8-Core Mac Pro, I guess what I’m asking is between a 2010 12-Core Mac Pro and the iMac 5K which would you get for FCP X work?”

John, I just added a new trash can and 5K iMac to my facility. The trash can just came in Thursday so I haven’t deployed it yet for day-to-day tasks (the iMac is still “processing” as Apple says). But the Mac Pro was purchased as a “heavy-iron” system for it’s ability to do heavy lifting and do it quickly. The 5K iMac is intended for either an audio station computer or a video editor station. We cut mostly ProRes, some RAW, and some 4K. But again for RAW or 4K the Mac Pro gets the nod. For everything else the iMac can handle it.

So it depends on what you need the computer to do. If you’re doing single threaded tasks the iMac will perform similarly to a new Mac Pro. Once you get into multi-threaded tasks (like transcoding) or heavy vfx/color grading (GPU tasks) the Mac Pro will excel. But for straight cutting the iMac is fine provided your storage medium is fast enough to feed you the video. Caveat to that though, is that you probably won’t find RAW/DNG or R3D files a smooth workflow on an iMac. But for ProRes, DNxHD it should have no problems (again provided your storage is fast enough).

Additionally, I’m not sure of where your deployment is, but in my space the Mac Pro is helpful as it has 2 NIC’s built in so one can run to our SAN while the other runs to the house network (this can be overcome on the iMac by using a Thunderbolt to Ethernet dongle). The abundance of Thunderbolt (with separate busses), USB 3, and HDMI ports are also helpful on the Mac Pro for speed and connectivity. The Mac Pro’s also feature server-class chipsets, error correcting RAM, and high end GPU’s all of which are built to stricter tolerances than the consumer components in a laptop or iMac. This becomes important if the computer is running 24/7/365 and is put under load continually.

Marco Arment has a great write up about the difference between the two computers that may be worth your time:
https://www.marco.org/2014/10/16/retina-imac-vs-mac-pro

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Steve Connor]

[John Rofrano] “If you’re saying that the 12 core didn’t match the iMac for editing then I really have some re-thinking to do.”

Yes, the iMac was faster for editing operation

[David Mathis]

A bit off topic but how does Resolve run on the new 5K model?

[Oliver Peters]

I dropped by the Apple Store to dispose of a bad MBP battery and took the chance to check out the 5K Retina iMac. Retina display, like all, doesn’t give you more real estate if set for “best for display”. You just get a higher-resolution image because of pixel density.

They had FCP X and some 4k footage. Of course the 1080 was fine, especially since it was all ProRes or ProRes Proxy. The 4K was ProRes and they had some multicam clips. With the angle viewer open it quickly dropped frames on a quad layout. Generally all playback on most of the demo timelines was smooth, but a number of times it still took about :01 to start playing from when you hit the space bar or J. I think it had a 1TB SSD internal drive.

Definitely a nice machine, but I’d only jump on it now if I had a 4K job to do (assuming it wouldn’t be too effects heavy). Loaded with the CalDigit T4 or one of the Promise arrays would run you about $6K total with the larger amount of storage. Expensive, but a lot cheaper than the Tube or even the HP Z1G2. And of course you get the screen, which looks great.

My gut feeling is that X runs a lot better on the iMac than an older MP, of course, but still not as optimized as it could be.

Oliver

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