Seriously though: New Mac or carry on with maxed out 5.1 Tower

[Terry Flaxton]

Herb – I should say I’m pretty convinced I’ll go to a new mac shortly – mainly because of the background architecture and I can see in the next year going up to 8k for what I do (because the market I work for is requiring that). All the outboard storage I have – around 90tb of it is esata so there is a reason to keep one machine going at the old level. I’ve been migrating since 1976 onwards – effectively leapfrogging by having a set of working macs in various OSX’s – and it’s always a question of when to reinvest. I have a mac museum.

So: “performance of GFX card upgrades”: are you talking about assisting the cores in their work? And how many cores is relevant? I have 12 at the moment so how many would make that shift impossible not to do? 16 or even 24 maybe?

And with Catalina as opposed to Mojave (because I can upgrade to Catalina easily enough with the 5.1) so I’ll have three OSX’s working on the same machine at different points) what exactly is that going to give currently? (I get it that it’s a future upgrade situation that is the main selling point).

This one strand has given me 1000 mbs extra on a drive due to my own stuck in a box mentality (and thanks Patrick) so thanks to everyone here for responding.

Made my first video in 1976, A long term programme maker, DP, editing etc – changing with AR/VR/MR media –

[Herb Sevush]

[Terry Flaxton] “All the outboard storage I have – around 90tb of it is esata so there is a reason to keep one machine going at the old level.”

I don’t know what kind of speed your are getting with the 6GB/s eSata raids but I doubt it’s anywhere close to what you can get with Thblt 3 at 40GB/s. I’m doing 2500 MBs with an 8 bay raid 5 and you can go even faster with an SSD raid. I do a lot of multicam editing and disk speed is essential for me.

[Terry Flaxton] “So: “performance of GFX card upgrades”: are you talking about assisting the cores in their work? “

Modern NLE’s offload alot of work to the GFX card’s GPU instead of solely using the CPU cores. Each NLE is different in how they leverage the GPU ( I use Ppro ) but better GPU equals better performance. The available GFX cards for the 2019 Mac Pro are an order of magnitude better thanthe 580x which is available as the base model. A magnitude higher cost as well.

[Terry Flaxton] ” how many cores is relevant? I have 12 at the moment so how many would make that shift impossible not to do? 16 or even 24 maybe?”

You would have to look up the best CPU for the NLE you use. The sweet spot in “bang for the buck” seems to be either 12 or 16 cores. YMMV.

[Terry Flaxton] “And with Catalina as opposed to Mojave (because I can upgrade to Catalina easily enough with the 5.1) so I’ll have three OSX’s working on the same machine at different points) what exactly is that going to give currently? (I get it that it’s a future upgrade situation that is the main selling point).”

The future upgrade aspect is the only reason to be interested in Catalina at the moment. I can’t think of one advantage in terms of daily use at this point. As a side note you are not going to be able to run Mojave and Sierra on the 2019 Mac Pro unless you have advanced programming chops. As far as Apple is concerned nothing earlier than Catalina can run the 2019.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Bob Zelin]

oh my God – I am trying SO HARD to not respond unprofessionally to Terry Flaxton – but it’s becoming really hard not to. We are as old or older than you, and I am about to explode from your posts.
You are so desperately hanging onto your old antiquated hardware, and trying to justify it – while the rest of us OLD GUYS have done the right thing. I am minutes away from booking a flight to the UK, flying to your location, hiring a couple of local thugs, holding your dog hostage, and stealing at least $6000 US of your money to get you a 2019 Mac Pro (and I will show you exactly what third party hardware to purchase) – just like Herb Sevush has suffered thru when he got his third party hardware.
And when you need new storage –
https://www.span.com

OK – I should probably just shut up right now.

You know what you need to do. And it has nothing to do with what you purchased before 2012.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Patrick Sheppard]

Terry,

Glad to hear you were able to move the 4M2 and see better performance! Nice thing about that card is that when you do step up to a new Mac, you’ll be able to take advantage of the high speed it was intended for since you’ll be on PCIe 3.0.

As for concerns about temperature, I suggest buying TG Pro by Tunabelly Software. It’s on sale for $10 right now (usually $20). It will allow you to manually adjust the fan speeds in your Mac to bring the temperatures down, and of course it monitors the temps and provides that info in real time. The developer issues regular updates as well. I’ve used this software myself for many years and highly recommend it.

Patrick

[Terry Flaxton]

Patrick – that’s very kind of you to tolerate my questions. Your help produced a real world increase in my knowledge and material circumstance. It may well be that I go across to a new mac and all the rest – but technical knowledge is important to acquire and go though understanding. Thanks again to you and all who helped.

Made my first video in 1976, A long term programme maker, DP, editing etc – changing with AR/VR/MR media –

[Terry Flaxton]

Ok so this is to everyone who responded to my post about maxing out a 5.1 Tower and yes Bob Zelin I am now biting the bullet. So here’s the question – I am solely using FCPX an often run 4 – 10 layers 4k with many effects:

I can buy either a 16 core 2020 mac with some internal extras such as a vega card and/or an apple after burner

Or I can buy a 24 core 2020 mac plus a little extra ram but no internal vega nor after burner

Both will have 128 gig ram and an internal OWC 4tb M2 and also a 16tb M2 at 5800 mbs for non stutter playback)

which route should I take?

Made my first video in 1976, A long term programme maker, DP, editing etc – changing with AR/VR/MR media –

[Joe Marler]

[Terry Flaxton] “I can buy either a 16 core 2020 mac with some internal extras such as a vega card and/or an apple after burner

Or I can buy a 24 core 2020 mac plus a little extra ram but no internal vega nor after burner”

The only thing the afterburner currently does is *decode* ProRes and ProRes RAW. It does not help encode of ProRes or decode/encode of any other codec. ProRes and ProRes RAW are already fairly easy to decode, esp. regular ProRes. Yes if you will be using multiple layers of 6k or 8k ProRes RAW that can get CPU-intensive and the afterburner card would help – but only in such cases.

It seems an upgraded GPU would have broader benefit.

Your current 5,1 MP does not have hardware acceleration for Long GOP formats. If all your acquisition is ProRes and all your exports are ProRes this is a non-issue. But if you ever must handle more compressed formats, a newer machine would likely help.

That said, FCPX on any current Mac is sluggish on certain formats such as Panasonic’s 400 mbps 10-bit all-intra, decode of Fuji’s 10-bit HEVC 400 mbps, and encode of 10-bit HEVC. It is not super fast on Sony XAVC-S either. The latest version of Resolve Studio on MacOS is a lot faster on some of these, so that proves it’s not a hardware issue.

[Tom Sefton]

Hi Terry,

We have the 16 core Mac Pro with an afterburner card, Pro Vega II and a Vega VII installed. We got the base level of RAM and upgraded to 256GB afterwards.

Working with ProRes, its incredibly fast. Afterburner does make a difference to encode times; not a huge amount, but if you are exporting hours of footage, that will be minutes of time saved. You can look at bare feats to show the increase in speed.

Based on the tests that bare feats have published, a sweet spot might be to use the cheaper 5700XT which way outperforms the base level GPU, and offers good thunderbolt 3 connectivity. Radeon VIIs are reasonably cheap and can be installed to offer even more performance boosts in resolve when grading and noise reducing footage.

Unless you work with 3D models and very complex Ae pieces, 24 cores probably won’t be utilised all that often.

We are using ours for multiple layers of 8K ProRes 60p footage in a VR project, as well as the noise reduction and grading in Resolve. The improvement in performance over a top spec iMac Pro has been very, very impressive.

I’m not spending your money, but based on what we have experienced, and what you are looking at doing, a 16 core with an afterburner should be very quick.

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

[Terry Flaxton]

Hi, I have no interest in further compressed codecs – other than what FCPX outputs to write on Vimeo which is if I have to share for a team (composer, collaborators etc). So I can use Resolve Studio if I have to come out of Pro Res. I wasn’t clear about the afterburner. Years back I bought a red rocket but shortly after they got overtaken by computing power… Thanks again.

Made my first video in 1976, A long term programme maker, DP, editing etc – changing with AR/VR/MR media –