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iMac Pro thoughts
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We have two iMacPros with a second 21:9 Dell widescreen monitor…tons of real estate. We have the QNAP 1282T3 and use the 10Gige to the 10Gige on the QNAP for about 700MB/sec speeds. Our old towers connect with the old reliable gigabit.
Yes, some desktop woes, but working thru them. A dock for the iMacPro isn’t really out there…most are for Macbook Pros that don’t have any ports. But the thing is fast. The internal SSD is pulling 3000MB/sec and that is no joke!
Photoshop is open in 6 seconds.
So far so good. Even liking the keyboard and mouse that came with them….and although we got the new trackpad we haven’t really used them much yet.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com -
[Rich Rubasch] “nd although we got the new trackpad we haven’t really used them much yet.
“This was always fascinating to me.
If my 2011 MacPro era GPU hadn’t been too weak to run the then brand new FCP X – I wouldn’t have had to learn the software on my laptop.
But because I did – I became a trackpad oriented FCP X editor from day one – and that completely unplanned change is what totally broke my decades of mouse reliance.
Now I literally haven’t touched a mouse in years – and the idea of reaching over to a mouse unit and breaking my “home row” hand position to do anything seems really strange.
Looking back it was a major shift in my expectations of how editing happens.
And really nice that with an external trackpad – my editing mechanics do not change – no matter what type system I’m driving.
For me it was one of my careers “happy accidents.”
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Interesting.
You mention you keeping libraries and caches on internal SSD–presumably with media on external drives.
Anyone else doing it? Are there performance gains?
I’ve been keeping everything, including the library, on external 7200 RPM Raids.
Wonder if there’s a performance boost by splitting library and media on internal and external drives. Thoughts? Experience?
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“You mention you keeping libraries and caches on internal SSD–presumably with media on external drives.
Anyone else doing it? Are there performance gains?
I’ve been keeping everything, including the library, on external 7200 RPM Raids.
Wonder if there’s a performance boost by splitting library and media on internal and external drives. Thoughts? Experience?”
Until recently I also kept all of my media and FCP X Libraries on external 7200rpm RAID drives. With my iMac Pro I keep media on external drives but move the Library (cache files inside) to the internal SSD and now audio waveforms draw significantly faster. Certainly the CPU and GPU play a role in drawing thumbnails and waveforms, but it seems to me that the storage itself makes the most noticeable impact. FCP X generates thumbnails and waveforms for different cameras at different speeds. The GH5 is extremely fast. The Sony Fs7 with multiple audio channels, however, is annoyingly slow to draw, so I’ll take my speed improvements wherever I can find them.
Gabriel Spaulding
Creator & Director of ACE Enterprizes
Videographer | Video Editor | Motion DesignerHow Can We Help You Tell Your Story?
http://www.aceenterprizes.com -
[Gabriel Spaulding] “Until recently I also kept all of my media and FCP X Libraries on external 7200rpm RAID drives. With my iMac Pro I keep media on external drives but move the Library (cache files inside) to the internal SSD and now audio waveforms draw significantly faster. Certainly the CPU and GPU play a role in drawing thumbnails and waveforms, but it seems to me that the storage itself makes the most noticeable impact. FCP X generates thumbnails and waveforms for different cameras at different speeds. “
FCPX I/O can be characterized as two very different profiles. One is typical large sequential I/Os for media. This is what benchmarks like Black Magic measure, and spinning RAID arrays are good at delivering that.
The other I/O profile is small random I/Os used for metadata management, in particular thumbnail generation, waveforms, info.plist files, etc. I assume the SQLite calls FCPX makes for database management also generate lots of small random I/Os. Unfortunately RAID arrays are not good at that. SSD drives are better, but even they have limits on random I/O per second (vs MB/sec) rates.
Here is an I/O histogram I generated using the terminal dtrace utility bitesize.d when FCPX was scrolling through a library with AVCHD .MTS files. There are lots of small I/Os: https://joema.smugmug.com/Computers/FCPX-Event-Browser-Perf-Data/n-M7bG7L/i-bCH2XFX/A
Which files it does I/O to can be inspected with the dtrace command iosnoop.
Regardless of I/O size or rate, a key item is whether the I/O system is overloaded. This can be examined with the dtrace command iopending which produces a histogram of how many async I/Os are backed up waiting to be serviced.
Using these commands is more difficult than older versions of macOS because of security restrictions. Starting with El Capitan you have to first disable System Integrity Protection. I wouldn’t recommend anybody use these unless they are quite familiar with terminal: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/208762/now-that-el-capitan-is-rootless-is-there-any-way-to-get-dtrace-working
How much of what I/O type varies based on what FCPX is doing, and also the codec. Scrolling through a large library with the Event Browser in filmstrip view incurs a lot more small I/Os than in list view. These thumbnails are then cached and subsequent scrolling is a lot faster. However if you resize the thumbnails there’s a threshold whereby they must be regenerated. Unfortunately there’s no manual control over this, such as in Lightroom where you can say “generate previews” and they are persistent.
As you said there are cases where putting the library and cache files on an SSD (even the system SSD) can help performance. However it can be difficult to determine whether this helps. Just because your spinning RAID array is chugging loudly doesn’t mean it’s overloaded. Lots of people speculatively put items on SSD, yet it may not help performance if the workflow isn’t I/O-limited. If you measure the before/after timing of a specific workload and it’s faster with library on an SSD, then that’s good evidence but methodically doing such things is time consuming.
I usually use a 4-drive spinning RAID-0 array and often put both library and media there. Sometimes if I have space and it’s a “lean” library I’ll put it on the system SSD or another external Thunderbolt SSD. If you use RAID-5 there’s a write penalty so it might be more important to put scratch/library files elsewhere in that case. However SoftRAID is very good at optimizing writes on RAID-5, so if you use that the penalty is often less than you expect.
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“As you said there are cases where putting the library and cache files on an SSD (even the system SSD) can help performance. However it can be difficult to determine whether this helps. Just because your spinning RAID array is chugging loudly doesn’t mean it’s overloaded. Lots of people speculatively put items on SSD, yet it may not help performance if the workflow isn’t I/O-limited. If you measure the before/after timing of a specific workload and it’s faster with library on an SSD, then that’s good evidence but methodically doing such things is time consuming.”
Tests like this are indeed time consuming, but so is waiting say 8 hours for waveforms to draw when the Library is on a RAID vs on the internal SSD, which is at times twice as fast. After a few years of cutting one recurring type of project with the Library on a RAID, then cutting the same project with the Library on the internal SSD, and seeing dramatic differences, the results were actually not difficult to determine at all —just move the Library to an SSD and compare the times. Granted, some of this speed improvement is moving to a beefier machine, but I tested the iMac Pro with the Library on a RAID and on the internal SSD and there is a huge gap in the amount of time it takes to draw waveforms.
Gabriel Spaulding
Creator & Director of ACE Enterprizes
Videographer | Video Editor | Motion DesignerHow Can We Help You Tell Your Story?
http://www.aceenterprizes.com -
Thanks for the insight.
Wonder if that is a best practice in general–or suited best to the power of the iMac Pro.
I’m on a 2013 nMP and wonder if I would get a performance boost as well by keeping libraries and caches on the internal SSD and continue to keep media on external raids….
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Apologies for what I imagine is an ignorant question, but why do you connect the iMac Pros to the QNAP 1282T3 via the 10GbE connections rather than via the Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) connections?
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Looking at getting the base version of the iMac Pro.
Thoughts on this compared to a D700?
Mostly After Effects and NLEs.
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If you serious about getting the base iMac Pro check out Microcenter – they have a crazy deal right now if you go into their store – $3999!
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
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