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New Mac Pro and FCPX Vs. Premiere
I have been reading some of the recent reviews of the new Mac Pro and am learning that because FCPX is optimized for two GPU’s, people are getting much better performance with FCPX than Premiere. Do you think Adobe will cache up? I am hoping so– My company started off with Avid, moved to FCP 7, then when Apple killed it, moved to Adobe Premiere and we have been enjoying it. Don’t want to turn back.
From a review of the new Mac Pro in The Verge:
“JL: I work in an Adobe world, where the story is a bit different. Premiere is also able to deal with native 4K Epic footage, so I brought in our test batch through the Media Browser. I set up a timeline based on the clips’ native size and codec. Without any rendering, and without applying any effects, I couldn’t play any Epic footage in Premiere at an acceptable frame rate. When I scaled the playback quality to one-half or one-quarter, playback and scrubbing were consistently smooth. Applying color correction or Warp Stabilizer to clips usually meant that I had to render those clips in the timeline (in ProRes 422, here) in order to play them back smoothly. Editing in Premiere didn’t feel much snappier on the Mac Pro than it does on the previous generation, or even on the current iMacs.”https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/23/5234574/apple-mac-pro-review-2013
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14 Replies
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Yeah- this caught me off-guard in the review, since I was under the impression that recent Pr updates had boosted OpenCL performance. Is Adobe still working to optimize performance vs Mercury or perhaps Verge isn’t running the most recent updates…?
I think the other thing in the review is including video game performance- which from my understanding IS NOT a sensible way to judge this machine, since games are HEAVILY optimized for certain gaming GPUs, which the AMD is clearly not.
That’s not to say that the MacPro is the machine for everyone- some apps are just set up for more CPU than GPU performance. In those cases, you could probably spend you’re money better.
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I wouldn’t worry too much about it. The issue was even addressed in the article.
“Once Adobe has had some time with the new tower and makes its software work a bit better with the new hardware — the way Apple has with Final Cut Pro X — that will hopefully change.”
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“Sometimes Life Needs a Cmd-Z!”
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Update: I got an email from Dave at Adobe, “We do support the gpus in the new Mac Pro in version 7.2.1 releases last week. We tweeted about our support as well.
Cheers
Dave”So It looks like The Verge was not using the latest version? I am going to email them to find out.
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I thought I remembered that. Hopefully Adobe will reach out to the Verge to issue an addendum.
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It does seem the tube is fcpx only. Premiere, avid and smoke are so far no-shows. Even with fcpx it also seems the software side has boosted performance significantly on the iMac. Really not feeling $5k+ for a 20% performance increase at best and in any case 4k is in the distant future still for me. Also I rarely layer more than 3 or 4 effects.
Is this machine really just designed for 1 niche program and silly overloading at that? -
If you read Ryan’s post from above, it seems that the Verge’s test was probably done with an OLD version of Premier that doesn’t support the MacPro’s GPUs. It was already updated for this, so the Verge’s test is out of date.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the 20% increase metric. And iMac can play 1 stream of “Better Performance” (1/4 debayer) RED footage. FCPX 10.1 and the MacPro can play 5 simultaneous streams at the same quality level. OR one stream of “Best Quality” (Full Debayer) RED footage, something that had until recently only be possible on systems with a $4,000 Red Rocket card.
I’m sure more benchmarks are coming, but anything that leans on the GPUs in the MacPro are likely to see significant speed bumps.
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It’s designed for whoever wants to take advantage of it. So if Adobe, Premiere, Smoke and and Avid choose not to, and you need that kind of horsepower (quite a lot of us cheesy corporate editors certainly put more than 4 effects on a layer, and I’ve already started with 4k for the resolution benefits alone) then I guess you’ll choose Final Cut. That’s sort of the point I think.
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Has anyone seen how this performs with Maya?
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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Seems like at one point Black Magic was raving about resolve running on the new MacPro. If so that just means other companies are going to have to work on compatibility now that they have access to the machines. My feeling is that very soon a lot of other companies will be touting new mac pro compatibility.
Thanks,
Vince Sanchez
Intel 12 core Mac 2.66
Intel Dual Quad Core 3.0
AJA LHe
AJA LHi
OSX 10.4.11
FCP 7
Premerie CC -
Things to keep in mind:
1) The Adobe tests were done with 5K footage. FCPX tests were done with 4K footage. 4K RED footage plays back multiple times better on all NLEs, even RedRocket cards. So, the tests is highly biased.
2) Apple has enjoyed plenty of lead time, and does not have to worry about cross OS compatibility. So say that Apple enjoys an ‘easier’ codebase it’s an understatement. I think Apple will always have the early lead in performance, but Adobe will catch up for the most part.
3) Wait until you see an NLE perform on an equivalent PC workstation, especially with a high-end Nvidia card. CUDA still yields a performance gains in most software … I think a lot of this hype (well deserved, nonetheless) will die down once we see a ProMAX system beat the mac pro even with a single GPU.
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