Mac Pro & Apple Cinema Displays

[Christopher Hicken]

Bob, I am so with you on this!

I do have the Quadro 4000 card also, and it does give a bump, but not enough.

[Stephen Lewis]

Hi guys,

I’ve experienced similarly unimpressive results with Premiere cs5.5 on my 3,1 Mac Pro.

My specs:
2×3.0Ghz (8 core)
10 gigs RAM
7200rpm HDDs
Running Lion

I don’t have a supported card (nVidia 8800GT) but Adobe claims that the GPU doesn’t work on playing back footage anyways, only in accelerating effects.

I’m a switcher from FCP to the CS5.5 suite. So far, compared to my less powerful PC which runs the CS4 suite, CS5.5 is SLOWER on the Mac. I can’t understand this, maybe it’s a Lion issue?

I edit a lot of DSLR media, plays back okay, but is painfully laggy when scrubbing the CTI (playhead)over multiple clips. Even Prores media is not playing back as smoothly as it did in FCP, which was a 32-bit application!

I hope things improve on the Mac side of CS5.5.

PS: I have installed the 5.5.1 update, but scrubbing and adjusting clip-effects are PAINFULLY slow still.

[Gary Huff]

That’s good to know, Jacob. Thanks for supplying that information.

Perhaps this is why we’re waiting for a new Mac Pro? Maybe Apple will still retain commitment to that line and are simply waiting for multiple CPU enabled i7-class Xeons? If that is the case, then perhaps my next desktop will be a Mac Pro that has that and just dual-boot Windows/Mac OSX (hopefully the GTX 580 will be supported under OSX by that time if not already…haven’t looked into that.)

[Greg Joyce]

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 from five years ago, and I’ve never been impressed with its speed, even when I upgraded to a new graphics card, now the ATI Radeon 4870, upped the RAM, and bought the OWC RAID setup with 2TBx4 drives. Still as slow as molasses.

I consider switching to PC every once in a while, but all my plugins are Mac based, and I bought a MBP last earlier this year, which I souped up with an OWC SSD, so I’m more than reluctant to move back to PCs and have to buy more licenses for PC versions of everything.

I’m tired of paying a premium for Apple hardware, but … I wonder if this article by Allan Tépper about mac minis and Thunderbolt RAIDS may be the right way to go:

https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/atepper/story/mac_mini_for_pro_video_editing_a_field_report_from_guatemala/

The disk speeds they get are 5 times (write) and 3 times (read) what I’ve been able to achieve.

Sounds pretty good. Or is it just time to embrace Adobe and a PC and forget about Apple for video editing — that is, video editing without needing to pay an arm and a leg for a Mac Pro?

[Darin Griffith]

After several months of working with this Mac Pro I’m feeling deep regret for my decision to run CS5.5 on the OS X platform. It works, kind of, not really fast & not real stable though. This may work fine for many people but my tremendous workload of all HD AVCHD footage means lots of work in AE and Premiere with tight deadlines. Simply put, I need more horsepower and memory.

So I’m now looking at building a hex core i7-3930K workstation with 32GB DDR3. My only real concern is how to utilize my two 27″ Apple Cinema displays (which I really love). They only have a male mini display port to use for feeding them. My first thought was a Quadro 4000 with 2 display ports but the specs say max resolution of 1920×1080 and these displays roll up to 2560 x 1440 and quite frankly I’ve become spoiled with mega desktop space. I’ve heard about the many problems with DVI to display port adapters but that may be my only option.

I am actually considering a GTX 570/580 since almost all of the top machines on PPBM5 are all running GTX cards. Anybody have any suggestions?