New MacBook Pro and CS5

[Chris Knight]

I’ll have some time tomorrow to dig up the benchmark results. I ran tests in Premiere (timeline and direct exporting), Media Encoder, and After Effects (as well as other non-Adobe software applications). A/C and battery tests on all, and again with the GPU manually disabled.

[Richard Lapthorn]

Hi Chris, I am just about to bite the bullet and order myself the identical laptop with the same GPU and specs. My question for you is, do you know how well it handles native AVCHD footage? Does it struggle with multiple streams? I will not have time to transcode on location and will have to work with the footage immediately as it comes out of my Panasonic AF101.

Cheers

Rich

[Chris Knight]

Just tried this. It plays 4 overlapping (two are PiP, and two are see-through via a transfer mode) 720p AVCHD (24Mbit) streams without any issues. It starts to drop frames on the 5th, and I’d say 6 is probably the limit (it can do more, but playback drops to less than 5 fps after that). I’m playing from a RAID0 array (2 x 1TB Samsung F3 drives), connected to the eSATA port. After turning off the GPU, I can still play 3 simultaneous AVCHD clips without dropping frames, but the 4th starts to play the timeline back at abour 12-15 fps.

AVC-Intra performance is about the same, but I doubt I’d get the same performance if I was not using a RAID.

This laptop has a 2Ghz 2630M i7 CPU with 8GB or RAM, and the 540M GPU has 2GB of memory. The boot drive was replaced with an SSD. I had to update the video drivers when I first got it, as Premiere was trying to play back everything in the Program monitor. All working fine since the update.

[Richard Lapthorn]

Cheers Chris. I’ve actually had to slightly change my plan as the laptop I wanted was gone by the time I went to purchase it.

I am now going for a Dell xps 17, featuring;

I7-2630QM 2ghz quad core with hyper threading
8gig of ram
Nvidia Gt 555m with 3ghz of ram
17″ 1600 x 900 screen

My G-drive will be connected by E-sata, but I have it in a raid5 congig. I appreciate raid0 is considerably faster, but I have had a few issues with drives in the past that have cost me clients after valuable data was lost. I now always err on the side of caution.

I do however have an SSD for my system drive and an extra 7200 internal drive for my scratch disk.

Do you think this setup might cause me problems?

[Chris Knight]

It’ll be fine.

I used RAID-5 arrays up until 6 months ago, when Windows decided to corrupt the MBR on two arrays. It seems to me that RAID-5 is no more secure than 0 (I haven’t had a physical drive issue in years, which is the real point to using RAID-5).

[Alex Schwindt]

Thanks so much for the thread. I’m at the point where I’m about to drop a chunk of my own money on a new editing laptop and I’m struggling with which direction to go. I was planning on buying a new MacBook Pro to run FCP, but we all know how that fiasco’s turning out…

I’ve been using Premiere over past few weeks and am really impressed with how it’s evolved. So my question is this: is it better to stay Mac or go Windows for Premiere/After Effects CS5.5?

Here are the two machines I’m considering –

Macbook Pro, 2.2GHz Quad-core Intel i7, 8GB ram, 500GB-7200rpm drive, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1GB graphics card

OR

Lenovo W520, 2.3GHz Quad-core Intel i7, 16GB ram, 500-7200rpm drive, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M 2GB graphics card

They’re about the same money, so to me what’s most important is total performance/experience. Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[alex schwindt] “They’re about the same money, so to me what’s most important is total performance/experience. Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.”

Lenovo W520 is a clear winner performance-wise because it sports an Adobe-supported GPU for hardware acceleration. Its support for up to 32GB RAM (4 slots vs. 2 slots / 16GB on MBP) can’t hurt either. Overall Lenovo is a better value and a better performer.

Alex (DV411)

[Mike Gill]

I would agree that the Lenovo is a winner of the two. I also hear ADK and Sager are other choices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8JpdND–g8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIG3wpSljcQ

On side not anyone know which Laptop is at 1:55 on the first link. Its the editor of the movie Monsters who was using a Laptop to edit on location with Premier. The second link also shows a laptop at 4:45.

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[Alex Schwindt]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the specks on the Lenovo are clearly superior. My only hesitation comes from my slight preference for Macs over PCs.

Does anyone know whether Premiere inherently runs better on the Mac OS, or is superior on Windows 7?
(all hardware specs being equal)

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Mike Gill] “On side not anyone know which Laptop is at 1:55 on the first link. Its the editor of the movie Monsters who was using a Laptop to edit on location with Premier. The second link also shows a laptop at 4:45.”

It appears to be a Toshiba (2nd video at 4:47: can’t quite make the letters, but Toshiba is the most likely match).

Alex (DV411)