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Opinion about fcpx and motion on imac i5 with 2gb GPU
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Glad you mentioned what card you had just in time.
There is a way to install a PSU in the optical bay, it requires customizing the case but it’s doable.
If you aren’t opposed to an expansion chassis that’s a good way to go. For dual 7950s you would lose a PCI slot without one.
Regardless, a single 7950 is still fast.
You can buy used CPUs and make it a 12c. If you are handy working on computers or know someone who is, sourcing your own CPUs can save you a lot.
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[Noah Kadner] “ep solid FCPX machine there”
Noah,
Does the fact the computer has a quad core i5 vs a quad core i7 bother you at all? When dealing with FCPX and Motion, is there a large amount of difference between the two?don walker
texarkana, texasJohn 3:16
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[Darren Roark] “The M395 is pretty impressive having used it next to my dual D700 Mac Pro.”
Impressive as in ‘it’s surprisingly good for a mobile GPU’ or impressive as in ‘it runs almost as good as the dual desktop GPUs in my MP’?
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Theres this thing I’m going to mention from my experience.
Years back before my switch to X, my orientation was to buy and maintain the biggest and most powerful hardware I could afford. And I’m not arguing against that at all in the new era. But…
I would argue, the new approach that X has pioneered (and that Adobe seems to be copying?) – of sequestered pools of transcodes and the switching of metadata pointers between them, combined with today’s super quick and capable CPUs and GPUs allowing you to blast high-raster pixels to a screen super efficiently even on a laptop processor – has largely changed my thinking about the type of hardware needed to effectively do my work.
Yes, there are times when I have a deep composite or am transcoding from one format to another that the heaviest duty hardware will surely help. But for me, that’s simply not that often.
Day to day, what I’m “actually” doing is creating metadata instructions about my editorial wishes and saving it in files to be applied across my content pools later. That’s not actually a very heavy lift for even a modest modern laptop.
It’s a fundamental change in my thinking. Basically that I’m not “crippled” in any functional sense when I’m working on my laptop compared to a bigger, more expensive (sometimes) desktop machine.
The cutting, coloring, sound work, editorial decision making and even the visual assessment of the images I’m working on – seem to go at the same speed on my laptop as they do when I’m working on a desktop system.
The only slowdown is when I’m ready to Apply those decisions to a finished master. That’s where the heavy hardware can likely make things a bit quicker and easier? That would surely matter if I was working in, say a news station with breaking “get it to air as fast as possible” environment. But I’m not.
It’s odd, but for the past 3 years, I haven’t even had “render in the background” turned on. I don’t care about rendering anymore. I can basically work without it and just invoke it when I sleep – and use the finished results when they are done without actually having to DO anything to get the improvement. It just shows up.. In between, the way X displays my work I feel I can make the same visual and editorial judgements without the necessity of pushing “perfected” streams through my computer in real time. For example, parking on a frame, gets me a full rez view, even if the entire stream hasn’t had time to transcode yet. And that’s fine until the rendered scene pool gets perfected in the background. When it does – bingo. I’m suddenly working with full rez files and seldom even notice the substitution.
Just one difference among many about making the transition from my old way of thinking to the new one.
Your workflow, needs and mileage may certainly vary.
But my 2 cents.
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[Bill Davis] “t’s a fundamental change in my thinking. Basically that I’m not “crippled” in any functional sense when I’m working on my laptop compared to a bigger, more expensive (sometimes) desktop machine.”
As someone that routinely edits with an ’09 MP and an ’11 MBP I completely agree. In the late 90’s (when computers struggled playing back a single stream of DV or a DVD) it would be inconceivable that a 7 year old computer would remain viable as an NLE. Thanks to the constant march of technology though many of the ‘difficult’ computing tasks of yesterday are easy computing tasks today. I remember when Apple switched to Intel and the Mac Mini with a Core 2 Duo chip held it’s own against the last generate G5 MP in CPU-centric tests. Either the C2D was a great budget chip or the G5 was really past its prime by that point (probably both).
Of course this is all kind of tangental to my question about the iMac vs the nMP. Is the iMac’s mobile GPU really that good? Are the dual GPUs in the nMP really that bad? Or does the software just not leverage the GPU enough to take advantage of 2 desktop GPUs vs a single laptop GPU? Kinda like how FCP 7 couldn’t access more than 4gig of RAM so 4gig was better than 2gig, but 16gig was no better than 4gig (as far as FCP was concerned).
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[Bill Davis] “Just one difference among many about making the transition from my old way of thinking to the new one.
Your workflow, needs and mileage may certainly vary.
“They do Bill, they really do 🙂
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[Andrew Kimery] “impressive as in ‘it runs almost as good as the dual desktop GPUs in my MP’?”
It surely doesn’t do that.
My experience working on a machine with it is I don’t miss my Dual D700s until I’m exporting or working in hugely complex effects or motion graphics. The day to day editing work is just fine, but exports take much longer.
Finding out the OP had a 7950 changed my mind. The tests I did with two of those in a cMP were faster than my Dual D700s, but not nearly enough for me to regret getting a nMP.
I read your other post, agreed that it’s a crazy time where a seven year old computer can become useful again by purchasing a card for it.
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[Steve Connor] “They do Bill, they really do :)”
Of course.
On other boards more X centric, we’re currently celebrating Mike Matzdorff uncovering a collaborative workflow in FCP X that has the potential to change how FCP X teams share iterations when working on major motion pictures.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with how I edit every day. And may or may not have any bearing on how you accomplish your day to day editing either. But I’m glad Mike and Glen and Jan and Kevin et al, seem to be as excited about X’s evolution and progress as I am!
The whole purpose of the recently shared FCPeXchange presentations was to highlight evolving FCP X solutions from all around the world that might be useful for many classes of editors, from single seat editors to the largest collaborative workflows on the planet.
That the same toolset that makes me a happy editor, ALSO makes folks at Metronome and Warner Brothers happy as well I find encouraging!
If we are actually on to something new and even a bit transformative in the editing space – a space that’s been very much “me too” for decades – I figure the opportunities for X workflow growth going forward will just continue to expand. And maybe I can be a part of that.
At this point, somebody will likely dredge up another term like “triumphalism” to attempt to paint this as inexperience and foolishness. Thats fine. Knock your socks off. In my rear view mirror NAB rocked. Cutting on X in near real time AT NAB in a live presentation situation taught me lots of cool new workflow tricks. Plus, I’m loaded down with interesting work now that I’m back home and having a blast doing THAT in X. The foreseeable future of my new toolset looks really bright.
Good times.
That’s all.
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[Darren Roark] “I read your other post, agreed that it’s a crazy time where a seven year old computer can become useful again by purchasing a card for it.”
Speaking of this, what’s you take on the new cards Nvidia just announced? Greater performance and lower power usage compared to the Titan X. I know one of the stumbling blocks to getting more powerful GPUs into the old MP’s was that the factory power supply just wasn’t designed to handle the load, but these new cards could give the old MP’s yet another lease on life.
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