New MacBook Pro and CS5

[Alex Gerulaitis]

It’s true that with MBP you won’t get the GPU acceleration part of the MPE – the rest will still work however: 64-bit and HyperThreading.

If your workflow involves a lot of things that can be GPU-accelerated, then you’d need a Windows laptop to get GPU acceleration.

Alex (DV411)

[Ron Pestes]

Thanks, and rats! That really makes my future purchases a brain scratcher. OUCH.

ronpesteshdvideo.com
Apple Certified Master Pro FCS 2
Sony EX-3
MacBook Pro

[Alex Gerulaitis]

GPU doesn’t really accelerate all that much – a loaded MBP without MPE GPU acceleration will still quite fast.

A Windows laptop with Adobe-approved graphics is at least $2K, and more like $3K:

HP EliteBook 8760w XU100UT: https://goo.gl/IbTvo
HP EliteBook 8740w XT910UT: https://goo.gl/tjJiZ

Both are $3K and the just-released 8760w has yet to ship. You can easily upgrade them to 16GB for around $140 or so; upgrading to 32GB will be more serious money.

So staying with MBP won’t be that bad considering the alternative. However much I hate to say that. 🙂

Alex (DV411)

[Tim Kolb]

The only thing I’d add to Alex’s advice is that there is an inherent issue with MBP’s with Premiere Pro CS5…the native codecs for DSLRs, etc are a bit of a load to run.

There are a variety of Windows laptops that are so powerful that you have to wear asbestos pants to keep from burning your legs and the battery life is typically enough to run for 45 minutes when the machine is new…like the links Alex included…good machines, but they’re really a portable workstation.

MacBooks are engineered for a more balanced performance/power drain scenario and while ProRes and proxies run pretty nicely on most MBPs…native editing in PPro often finds a typical MBP processor bottle necking when you add that second layer of color corrected DSLR footage…etc.

The Mac will run longer on battery, but it’s design goals are really different than what PPro would typically need.

PPro’s design is what enables it to run all these formats natively, but its hardware host is what carries the water.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Chris Knight]

For portable editing (or, rather, a hotel room edit suite), I purchased an $1,100 Dell XPS 15 with an i7 Sandy Bridge CPU (base price – additional RAM, SSD, and W7Pro upgrade added about $450 more).

The GPU (2GB nVidia 540M) doubles h.264 encoding speed in Media Encoder (I benchmarked this with various source files), and allows for far more RT performance in the timeline. I’d say the GPU makes a massive difference, and is not something that should be ignored when deciding on a Premiere solution.

The laptop also has 2 x USB 3.0 and eSATA, so my portable RAID runs just fine from various ports. It has DisplayPort and HDMI outputs as well, and the 3 year next-day-on-site tech. support is a nice touch.

You don’t have to spend a lot to get excellent portable performance with Premiere/AE/ME.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Chris Knight] “The GPU (2GB nVidia 540M) doubles h.264 encoding speed in Media Encoder”

How do you turn GPU acceleration on or off in AME to benchmark its effect on encoding speed?

Alex (DV411)

[Chris Knight]

Unplug the laptop. The nVidia GPU only works when it’s plugged in, and switches to an Intel chipset when on a battery.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Are you sure it’s not because of CPU throttling down while on battery?

AME isn’t GPU accelerated – only direct export out of Pr.

Alex (DV411)

[Chris Knight]

Well, whatever you want to call it, Exporting h.264 out of Premiere is exactly twice as fast with a 540M GPU. Yes, I considered that unplugging might throttle down the CPU, which is why I also removed the GPU from the text file in the Premiere folder (and verified that Mercury Engine was running in software only mode). I performed many benchmarks on this laptop before committing to it.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Chris, I ain’t questioning you, just trying to figure out if in your case AME somehow gets a boost from the GPU. Yours is a very useful info that I am very grateful for, and will likely adjust my recommendations to my clients based on it.

Did you do the benchmarks in AME or in Pr direct export?

To verify if the CPU throttles down while on battery, you can run specific WinSAT tests – let me know if you’d like the info.

Alex (DV411)