nMP or iMac for 4K

[Noah Kadner]

No such thing as future proofing in this business. But I think bang for buck 5K iMac is the best deal if money is an object. More deets:

https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac/imac-vs-mac-pro-best-mac-desktop-for-professionals-2016-3596405/

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops
XinTwo – FCPX Training

[Tom Sefton]

Have a look at the forever project link I posted a few weeks back. Documents a 2 year project working with red raw footage on the new Mac Pro. Brilliant performance.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Oliver Peters]

I read through that, but I didn’t see any info on the Mac Pro configuration you went with. Would you break that down? Thanks.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

Thanks. Those reviews are unfortunately kind of “consumerish”. I’m concerned about the GPUs. So far I’m steering away from the D700, because those seem to be the defective ones that burn up. Any update on that front?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Noah Kadner]

Sounds like you need to nail down the workflow first- 4K ProRes vs 4K REDCODE are night and day.

Were it the latter I’d want a 12-core and a RED Rocket in a Sonnet box if I planned to sleep well at night. The former would cut like butter in either machine.

Or add an Odyssey 7Q+ or an Atomos Ninja Flame

Then it won’t matter which camera you shoot- you’ll get awesome ProRes.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops
XinTwo – FCPX Training

[Oliver Peters]

[Noah Kadner] “Were it the latter I’d want a 12-core and a RED Rocket in a Sonnet box if I planned to sleep well at night. The former would cut like butter in either machine.”

Thanks. I’ve actually done a lot of RED work and I don’t find much advantage to the Rocket card over a fast processor. In fact, in the early days of X, there was a serious conflict between X and the Rocket, so I’ve soured on it ever since. My preference would be for ProRes as well. I suspect, no matter what the hopes are, the final mix will be from several different camera formats. My gut feeling is that I’ll probably been using the proxy workflow.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Gary Huff]

[Tom Sefton] “Documents a 2 year project working with red raw footage on the new Mac Pro. Brilliant performance.”

And is it still the original one you bought? Did Apple have to service it? What GPUs did you get in it?

[Lance Bachelder]

My last feature was all native 4K .r3d’s and I cut it with no issues on a nMP 6-core with D700’s and a fast Thunderbolt raid. I think the raid was a very important part of the real-time performance. I’ve since gone back to an older Mac Pro with the GTX 980 in it and it’s fine with Red footage. Why not just update your 12-core? What GPU do you have? I’ve got a 4 drive raid inside and SSD boot drive with 2nd SSD for cache and all is pretty nice but I do miss Thunderbolt…

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Tom Sefton]

We got one 8 core with d700s and then added another with the same spec. First one had 32GB ram the next had 64.. Extra ram made a positive difference for working in fcpx. Both are still in heavy use for the forever project and any other work that passes through. Both machines have a gtech studio xl raid attached via thunderbolt, an apple monitor via thunderbolt, an external soundcard via usb3 and peripherals – the speeds we have been getting are helped massively by the speed of the raids.

We never had any servicing required for either, but purchased AppleCare as a fail safe. The d700s never let us down once. Realtime r3d encoding to ProRes, then stepped down to h264 or h265 using compressor was easy. The one place the Mac Pro isn’t as good as the iMac is encoding to h264 – the iMac is faster for this. However it’s counter productive as I’m not sure if I could leave an iMac encoding for a week and expect it to last as long without requiring servicing – I could be wrong though…?

If you’ve got a lot of footage to chew through, you might find the iMac gets very hot and struggles without a red rocket X – add this purchase price on with a sonnet enclosure and you are past the expense for a Mac Pro which doesn’t require it unless you need faster than realtime encoding. Can’t praise the new Mac Pro highly enough – suppose the only consideration is whether apple will release something new in the fall.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] “update the primary machine from an older 12-core MP tower to a new machine. What is the consensus out there for extensive 4K editing? Either some configuration of the nMP or a decked out iMac. Thoughts? Experiences? Configurations?”

I have about 64 terabytes of Thunderbolt RAID storage on my 2015 top-spec iMac 27 and it mostly handles H264 4k in FCPX, although I always use proxy for multicam material. I also use Premiere CC 2015.3 for some things, which is somewhat more CPU-intensive and slower than FCPX when scrubbing a 4K H264 timeline.

Of course ProRes and REDCODE would be different but I’d still be concerned about using even a top-spec iMac 27 for your application since you have other options.

I would first suggest possibly upgrading your 12-core Mac Pro tower. Some GPU options are here: https://www.macvidcards.com/

My second suggestion would be get whatever nMP you can afford, despite it being late in the design cycle.

My third suggestion would be a top-spec 2015 iMac 27. Any of these choices can do the job, just some better than others.

If you use Premiere I would definitely not use the iMac. Premiere makes heavier demands on the CPU and GPU for a given amount of work, and having more CPU cores and a more powerful GPU would be real assets, which are not options with the iMac. That said, as of 2015.3 Premiere supports proxy and in my tests it really speeds things up, although it took about twice as long to generate as FCPX.

From an editing standpoint, the data path (hence screen output performance) should be independent of output screen resolution. You are reading and transforming data in memory based on the project resolution. IOW scrubbing 4K on a MacBook Air should not be faster than a retina iMac 27.

However ultimately the data must be written to the display, and for a 5k display that’s about 2x the pixels to move as a 4k display, and 4x the pixels of a 2013 and earlier iMac 27. The retina iMac 27 works pretty well editing on 4k video but IMO it needs higher performance display hardware, whether that’s the GPU, the Timing Controller (TCON), the busses or all of those.

Fast, fluid 4K editing is just really difficult on almost any hardware or editing software. We are unfortunately at the tail end of the nMP design cycle so people who need updated machines are in a difficult situation. Lots of people use the retina iMac 27 for 4k editing and it does work, but I would tend to recommend the nMP or an upgraded Mac Pro tower.