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MacBook Pros “underpowered?” Not for FCP X editors. Not AT ALL.
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[andy patterson] ” I am giving you actual information on why FCPX is faster when using an Intel CPU with Quick Sync. H.264 will render faster on a $2800.00 iMac than on an $8,000.00 Mac Pro. “
It’s not just rendering — it is any action involving decoding (not just encoding) H264, such as playing content from the timeline or quickly going forward or reverse on the timeline using JKL commands. Testing both Premiere CC 2017 and FCPX 10.3.2 back-to-back on the same iMac shows Premiere is not only a lot slower at H264 export but it burns a lot more CPU cycles just playing content or moving around the timeline.
Unfortunately H264 encode/decode cannot be meaningfully accelerated using GPU methods, but Quick Sync (essentially an on-chip ASIC transcoder) does make a big difference. I think Adobe started minimally supporting Quick Sync on Windows but not on Macs. Why Adobe has been so slow to support Quick Sync and why still no Mac support, I have no idea. Until Adobe can figure this out, FCPX will retain a significant performance advantage over Premiere when editing, timeline rendering or exporting H264 media on a MacBook.
It would be interesting to test H264 export performance and timeline CPU utilization on both Premiere and FCPX on the same Mac Pro, which uses Xeon. That would eliminate Quick Sync and would be a more pure software efficiency comparison.
Despite the better efficiency and performance of FCPX, for some common workflows it doesn’t make a huge difference. E.g, 4k H264 is now very widespread and even FCPX isn’t fast enough (despite Quick Sync) to smoothly edit 4k H264 multicam on the fastest iMac made — you have to generate proxy files. Premiere also now has proxy support and like FCPX, once proxy files are generated, multicam 4k H264 is lightning fast. So what’s the difference from a performance standpoint if they both require proxy and they are both fast after generating those? FCPX will still be faster at H264 export (at least on a CPU with Quick Sync) but that is only one element of workflow.
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[Oliver Peters] “[andy patterson] “Adobe should go PC only and let the performance get even better.”
They’ve been there before and it was not a winning strategy.”
Actually it was at the time. When Apple opted to start using Intel CPUs Adobe decided to give it another go with Premiere Pro on the Mac. Sales were higher than expected so they have kept supporting both Mac and PC. If Apple opted for Motorola CPUs next week I am sure Adobe we have do decided if it is worth it or not.
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[Shawn Miller] ” I’ve been banging around in corporate and indie film production for about as long, and in my corner of the creative universe (event, corporate, indie, local, etc)… editors aren’t nearly as OS centric. I think I’ve only been required to use a Mac twice in my whole career… and that was at Microsoft. ☺ Like I said though, I don’t have any real numbers to support my beliefs, but I would be interested in knowing what the breakdown is. “
and in my corner of the industry I haven’t seen hardly any shops using PC’s at all, I haven’t edited on a PC based NLE for at least a decade
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[Steve Connor] “[Shawn Miller] ” I’ve been banging around in corporate and indie film production for about as long, and in my corner of the creative universe (event, corporate, indie, local, etc)… editors aren’t nearly as OS centric. I think I’ve only been required to use a Mac twice in my whole career… and that was at Microsoft. ☺ Like I said though, I don’t have any real numbers to support my beliefs, but I would be interested in knowing what the breakdown is. ”
and in my corner of the industry I haven’t seen hardly any shops using PC’s at all, I haven’t edited on a PC based NLE for at least a decade”
I don’t doubt that – what kind of work do you mostly do? As kind of an interesting side note, of the people that I know who do the same kind of work as I do, hardly anyone uses Vegas (anymore), Avid or FCPX, and the split between Premiere Pro and FCP Classic seems to be 70/30ish (probably less for FCPc, now that I think about it). It makes me wonder how the conversation might be different on the Premiere Pro forum.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “I don’t doubt that – what kind of work do you mostly do?”
A few years ago it was Documentary but it’s mostly Corporate and Web now with occasional music Vid and short films
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[Steve Connor] “[Shawn Miller] “I don’t doubt that – what kind of work do you mostly do?”
A few years ago it was Documentary but it’s mostly Corporate and Web now”
That is interesting – I wonder what explains the differences we’re seeing in OS preference… region maybe?
Shawn
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[Andrew Kimery] “[andy patterson] “Adobe could just say to the Apple users the PC works just fine and we will no longer support Apple.”
Adobe tried that with PPro and came back to the Mac because a huge part of the editing community is on the Mac. Avid merely hinted that they might try that and there was a near riot from their Mac user base.”
Premiere Pro was only brought back to the Mac because Apple opted for Intel CPUs. If Apple opted for Motorola next week Adobe would have to decide if it is worth it or not. Adobe already has to worry about Open CL and CUDA both. I think they should stick to one or the other. I would hate to have them write for the instruction set of a non X86 CPU on top of that.
[Andrew Kimery] “I’ve thought about switching a lot in the past couple of years, but as a freelancer in LA I move around a lot and it’s just easier to have a Mac because almost everyone else has a Mac. Switching would be more of a headache than it’s worth to me. If anything I’ll do a Hack before I go Windows. Again, not because I have anything against Windows, but just because I work in a Mac-centric part of the industry in a Mac-centric city.”
Switching would be super easy if you use Premiere Pro because every Adobe user would be forced to do it. You also would not have the option to go Hackintosh if they quit support for OS X. I highly doubt Adobe would do it but it would make things easier for them.
[Andrew Kimery] “[andy patterson] “Adobe should go PC only and let the performance get even better.”
It doesn’t work like that. Apple can wring out a performance boost because they control both the hardware and the software.”
Apple uses 3rd party hardware from Intel, AMD and Nvidia the same as my DIY PC. Some of the transitions and filters have been taken out of Premiere Pro on the PC side because they could not implement them on the Mac OS. As seen from the benchmark Adobe prefers PCs not Macs. Apple obviously cannot wring out a performance boost. I am willing to bet my DIY Windows system could slightly outperform an iMac with similar specs. What if Premiere Pro gets a boost in performance from the new AMD CPUs?
[Andrew Kimery] “Adobe can’t wring out a performance boost by going PC-only because they still have to support millions of possible PC configurations.”
Actually if it was not for Apple Adobe could have kept supporting CUDA only. All PC vendors offer Nvidia but Apple does not offer Nvidia in the Mac Pro.
[Andrew Kimery] ” Now if Adobe went Mac-only then they might be able to better optimize their software for Mac hardware because Macs have very few variables compared to PCs.”
It is the CPU and GPU that the programmers must worry about. Not hard drives and RAM.
[Andrew Kimery] “Or Adobe could build their own Adobe-brand PCs and optimize their software for their machines, but I don’t see that happening either. ;)”
They would still be writing for Windows, Intel and Nvidia so it would work on any PC with those components or are you suggesting Adobe actually be like SGI and make their own CPU, GPU and OS? I could see Adobe writing their own OS and forcing everyone to their new OS platform called Adobe Alpha. Maybe they should have their own OS. I think Adobe is big enough to do it but I doubt they would.
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[Joe Marler] “It’s not just rendering — it is any action involving decoding (not just encoding) H264, such as playing content from the timeline or quickly going forward or reverse on the timeline using JKL commands. Testing both Premiere CC 2017 and FCPX 10.3.2 back-to-back on the same iMac shows Premiere is not only a lot slower at H264 export but it burns a lot more CPU cycles just playing content or moving around the timeline.”
Have you tried using Premiere Pro with a PC? I will put my PC against your iMac.
[Joe Marler] “I think Adobe started minimally supporting Quick Sync on Windows but not on Macs. Why Adobe has been so slow to support Quick Sync and why still no Mac support, I have no idea.”
I don’t think Adobe supports Quick Sync. There is a plugin I believe. I think Adobe was concerned about quality over speed and they wanted the same experience for the XEON and i7 computers.
[Joe Marler] “Until Adobe can figure this out, FCPX will retain a significant performance advantage over Premiere when editing, timeline rendering or exporting H264 media on a MacBook.”
Once again have you tried using Premiere Pro on a PC?
[Joe Marler] “It would be interesting to test H264 export performance and timeline CPU utilization on both Premiere and FCPX on the same Mac Pro, which uses Xeon. That would eliminate Quick Sync and would be a more pure software efficiency comparison.”
It has been done and Premiere Pro wins a few and FCPX wins a few. Having said that I will put my system against a $3,000.00 Mac Pro.
[Joe Marler] “espite the better efficiency and performance of FCPX, for some common workflows it doesn’t make a huge difference. E.g, 4k H264 is now very widespread and even FCPX isn’t fast enough (despite Quick Sync) to smoothly edit 4k H264 multicam on the fastest iMac made — you have to generate proxy files. Premiere also now has proxy support and like FCPX, once proxy files are generated, multicam 4k H264 is lightning fast. So what’s the difference from a performance standpoint if they both require proxy and they are both fast after generating those?”
Can you email me the 4K files? I am not saying I can play them with out trans coding but I would like to try it. Can your iMac play 5 layers of the native Red One R3D files with multiple effects applied? My PC can do it with ease. Some one stated their older Mac Pro did multi-cam better than the new Mac Pro when using Premiere Pro. The video below shows my PC doing multi-cam with Red One R3D 4K files. Having said that are you trying to watch 4K at full resolution?
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[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. 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. “
Several years ago, some felt that hardware transcoding had significant image quality issues. This 2012 article was titled “The Wretched State of GPU Transcoding”: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/128681-the-wretched-state-of-gpu-transcoding
It also misleadingly lumped Quick Sync into that group, even though it’s not technically GPU transcoding. Rather Quick Sync is “fixed function” logic, like an ASIC. It requires resources from Intel’s on-chip GPU, which is why it’s not in most Xeons — Intel would have to put the entire GPU in Xeon just to get Quick Sync. Why they designed it that way, I don’t know. But from an API or algorithm standpoint, Quick Sync and the GPU are different.
Back in 2012, Quick Sync and related software were less refined. Today I cannot easily tell the difference between a single-pass H264 export from FCPX (which uses Quick Sync) vs a multi-pass export (which does not). In 10.3.1, Apple even changed the export default to “Faster Encode”, IOW single-pass, and it’s not sticky — if you want multi-pass encoding you have to select this each time. They seem confident about the quality of single-pass encoding.
So the state of Quick Sync transcoding has definitely changed and the current quality level of single-pass encoding seems very high — at least from FCPX.
True GPU transcoding is a misleading term since no long-GOP encoding method (H264, H265, VP9, etc) can be greatly accelerated using traditional GPU methods. The core algorithm is inherently sequential and not amenable to the fine-grain parallelization a GPU can provide. More recently GPU vendors have added separate proprietary fixed-function logic to their GPUs, conceptually similar to Quick Sync. nVidia’s is NVENC and AMD’s is VCE. However these each have multiple versions with varying capability and if software used those APIs it would be vendor-specific and version-specific. IOW if Adobe wrote to NVENC ver. 4, that would only work on those cards which are in some PCs and not on any current Apple computer.
Each GOP can be processed in parallel, but examination of typical GOP sizes shows they are pretty large, so there aren’t enough GOPs in most files to harness thousands of lightweight GPU threads. However if doing purely software transcoding, each CPU core can simultaneously handle a separate GOP, but there aren’t usually enough cores, although the more cores the better. This is why all CPU cores are pegged when encoding to H264, even though the intra-GOP encoding algorithm is sequential — each core is processing a separate GOP.
This might partially explain why Adobe has been so slow at adopting Quick Sync or other hardware-assisted transcoding but I’m guessing there is a deeper explanation which nobody yet knows.
Intel has a PCIE card called Visual Compute Accelerator (VCA) containing three quad-core Xeon E3 chips, which is intended for server-side media transcoding. So some Xeons do have Quick Sync, but only 4-core versions — not useful to a workstation. However in theory you could put a VCA in a high-end workstation and if the software supported it, you’d have tremendous transcoding performance: https://www.intelserveredge.com/intelvca/ It is $2,500 but that’s no more than some high-end nVidia Quadro cards.
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[andy patterson] “Have you tried using Premiere Pro with a PC? I will put my PC against your iMac”
I have used Premiere since CS4 and have obviously tested this many times on a PC. There is no question that a top-spec iMac can export H264 a lot faster than Premiere on either the same Mac hardware or a comparable PC — and maybe any PC. In theory Premiere on a multi-socket PC with enough cores might eventually beat FCPX on a 4Ghz iMac at exporting to H264, but it would take a lot of cores. If Adobe ever truly supports Quick Sync or the other hardware-accelerated transcoding methods like NVENC or VCE, that would make a difference.
[andy patterson] “…I don’t think Adobe supports Quick Sync. There is a plugin I believe. I think Adobe was concerned about quality over speed and they wanted the same experience for the XEON and i7 computers.”
This is a quote from Adobe’s Premiere CC 2015.3 feature list: “…initial support for Apple Metal and accelerated H.264 decode on Windows using Intel Quick Sync Video.” There was a tiny footnote somewhere (which I can’t find right now) which said “Windows only”. However if Adobe is using Quick Sync, they aren’t doing a very good job of it. https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/features.html
[andy patterson] “…Can you email me the 4K files? I am not saying I can play them with out trans coding but I would like to try it. Can your iMac play 5 layers of the native Red One R3D files with multiple effects applied?”
These aren’t special 4k H264 files — they are from various cameras including Panasonic AG-DVX200, Sony A7RII, GoPro Hero5, DJI Phantom 4 Pro, etc. They all behave similarly on FCPX vs Premiere. They are too big to send but you can download sample files from those cameras from Vimeo or many other places. Just create a 3-camera 4k multicam, enable multicam playback, set the monitor to 1/4 res, then use JKL to scrub back and forth on the timeline. Re playing 5 layers of Red One with multiple effects — I have no idea and have no current need to investigate that.
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