MacBook Pros “underpowered?” Not for FCP X editors. Not AT ALL.

[Brett Sherman]

[Shane Ross] “This might also prove that Apple only really cares about how it’s hardware works with it’s NLE…and doesn’t care at all about performance with other NLEs. Which I guess is fine for them, as FCX sells a lot more copies than Avid and PPro. But does show a general “we really don’t care to play well with others” attitude.”

Not necessarily. Could be Adobe’s lack of interest in improving performance over new “features”. It clearly is an advantage to Apple to have the resources of OS development, but Adobe knows that and can respond accordingly. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know.

————————–
Brett Sherman
One Man Band (If it\’s video related I\’ll do it!)
I work for an institution that probably does not want to be associated with my babblings here.

[Herb Sevush]

Bill –

I’m looking at the graph and I’ve looked at the video and I still don’t see the 10X you mentioned. The Dell rendered the short file in 18:51, the 2016 MBP rendered it in 5:13 – that’s 3.5X better. The FCPX render doesn’t matter because it was using different settings and is not a comparable item. 3.5X faster is a major wow, but I don’t see how you get 10X out of those numbers. Unless your talking about X being 10X better than Adobe on a MBP, which of course begs the question, why would anyone bother to do that? Adobe is infinitely better than X on a Dell, since X is single system only, so maybe you can throw that onto your graph as well. Still 3.5X faster is a major wow.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[David Roth weiss]

But Herb, even if the renders were actually ten times faster, would that boost an editor’s productivity by 10X?

I would say that if the job were only rendering then that might be true, but alas most editors actually edit and do a whole of storytelling.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Herb Sevush]

[David Roth Weiss] “even if the renders were actually ten times faster, would that boost an editor’s productivity by 10X?”

I spend 1.5 weeks working on an episode before I export my first rough cut, so speeding up the render would barely affect me at all, especially since I output ProRes and then let AME handle any h264 I need in the background (it’s actually handled automatically by a second system networked to the first and using a watchfolder.) Since my deliverables are ProRes, and I’m’ guessing this whole Quick-sync thing is only for h264, it would have little effect on my workflow.

But if your deliverables are h264 and you can speed up the process by a factor of 10, then that’s impressive. It’s even impressive if you can ramp up the speed by a factor of 3.5.

It does show the advantage of having the OS tuned for the NLE, but again it’s Apple’s vision of the future – cutting video on a laptop, tune everything for Youtube, appeal to the audience watching video on their iPhone. Nothing in that description applies to what I do.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Paul Neumann]

I like to say I edit “with” a laptop, not “on” a laptop. I can go for days without ever opening my MBP. From the bag to the desk and then back to the bag. At the office or at home pretty much the same thing. Not saying I couldn’t, just saying I don’t.

Rendering times aren’t that important in my overall workflow. Dynamic linking Photoshop and Illustrator files, Live Text templates from After Effects and sending a timeline with however much audio I have in it directly to Audition with video and then exporting the finished product from there is where I see my real productivity boosts.

I like and use FCPX for certain things, but the Adobe workflow saves me a ton of time no matter what machine I’m on.

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “I imagine the settings are about the same. FCPX is using Intel’s Quick sync for h.264 renders. There are software titles for the PC that can use Intel’s Quikc Sync. “

Do you happen to know why Adobe doesn’t support Quick Sync in the same way? I’ve tried googling it, but haven’t come up with any info (other than people asking if/when Adobe will support it). I’ve found third party encoding plugins that support it and work with Premiere Pro, but they are Windows-only.

[Brett Sherman] “Not necessarily. Could be Adobe’s lack of interest in improving performance over new “features”. It clearly is an advantage to Apple to have the resources of OS development, but Adobe knows that and can respond accordingly. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know.”

Adobe also has to worry about being cross platform which typically necessitates running well on everything, but being optimized for nothing.

[Andy Patterson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Do you happen to know why Adobe doesn’t support Quick Sync in the same way? I’ve tried googling it, but haven’t come up with any info (other than people asking if/when Adobe will support it). I’ve found third party encoding plugins that support it and work with Premiere Pro, but they are Windows-only.”

I think they felt as though the quality would not be as good. I think Quick Sync will only work with single pass renders. My system renders pretty fast with a mediocre GTX 1060 and a mediocre 3.4 GHZ Haswell Quad Core CPU. I imagine what a GTX 1080 and 8 Core CPU will do. AMD will be launching 8 core CPU for under $500.00 in a week or two.

[Andrew Kimery] “Adobe also has to worry about being cross platform which typically necessitates running well on everything, but being optimized for nothing.”

That does make things harder for Adobe. If I were Adobe I think I would drop support for Apple (in two years from now). PCs are not evil : )

[Andy Patterson]

[Paul Neumann] “Rendering times aren’t that important in my overall workflow. Dynamic linking Photoshop and Illustrator files, Live Text templates from After Effects and sending a timeline with however much audio I have in it directly to Audition with video and then exporting the finished product from there is where I see my real productivity boosts.”

I agree. Rendering is a very small part of video editing and the Adobe products work well together.

[Bill Davis]

Famously: When the tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
On all sides.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “I think they felt as though the quality would not be as good. I think Quick Sync will only work with single pass renders. My system renders pretty fast with a mediocre GTX 1060 and a mediocre 3.4 GHZ Haswell Quad Core CPU. “

Possibly. From what I’ve Googled, Quick Sync gets improvements with each new CPU generation from Intel and the Kaby lake CPUs will be able to handle 10-bit video so the quality seems to increasing a lot with each update.

[andy patterson] “That does make things harder for Adobe. If I were Adobe I think I would drop support for Apple (in two years from now). PCs are not evil : )”

That probably wouldn’t go well as I’d bet the majority of Adobe’s base are Apple users. Even if Adobe went Windows-only it wouldn’t solve their problem of having to support a nearly infinite combination of hardware, drivers, chipsets, etc.,.