Understanding FCPX under the hood.

[Andrew Hays]

I’m thinking of what i need as a freelance shooter/editor. I’ve also posted this on Adobe and Avid forums here on the cow.

[Walter Soyka]

[Andrew Hays] “I want to understand specifically what FCPX uses Hardware -wise when the program is importing (transcoding) a file, Rendering a file, and exporting a file. What does the program use? Does it rely on huge amounts of RAM? Does it mainly rely on a lot of cores? Is the Graphics card the big thing?”

All of the above (plus storage).

[Andrew Hays] “I mainly want to know what I need to invest in to import, render, transcode, and export media fast. “

A balanced system is important for running a modern application like FCPX or Pr.

Imbalanced systems bottleneck, wasting resources. The fastest CPU in the world with minimal RAM will provide a bad experience — if you’re going to have little RAM, you may as well get a slower CPU, too. Likewise with the fastest GPU but slowest CPU, or most RAM and slowest GPU, etc.

[Andrew Hays] “I’m looking for detailed technical answers here, not “just buy the new imac. lolz. FCPX RULES!””

Well… the iMac looks to be the best choice for FCPX — it’s got a pretty good GPU, and the latest-generation Intel processors (which feature new instruction sets that FCPX is optimized for that the Mac Pros do not provide).

https://www.barefeats.com/fcpx01.html
https://www.barefeats.com/imac12p1.html

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Andrew Hays]

thanks for the reply Walter. The iMac does look nice too.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Just buy the new iMac, lolz, fcpx rules.

If you need portability, check in to the Retina mbp.

If you don’t, check in to one of the brand new 27″ iMacs.

Get the fastest i7, the most ram, and the fastest GPU, basically, max it out.

It’ll serve you longer, it will work the fastest until the next fastest machine comes out in 6 months and eclipses it.

With fcpx, according to Apple, transcoding in the app takes CPU, exporting goes to the GPU. All of that will require as much ram as you can afford and the computer will allow.

The retina has ssd hard drives, I’d get the biggest one you can afford as its going to be hard to do a user upgrade on it, if not impossible.

The iMac has more internal storage options. The Fusion drive sounds kinda cool, but not sure what it means in reality.

The current crop of Apple computers have Nvidia GPUs so you’ll be doing OK for Pr even if you haves to hack the GPU text file to get CUDA fired up in the iMacs.

O you can buy an i7 pc and kiss apple goodbye. Pc rules. Lolz.

[Geoff Addis]

Is it possible to CUDA enabble the current 27inch iMac’s GPU for use with Resolve? If so, could I have the details please.

[Bernard Newnham]

“Or you can buy an i7 pc and kiss apple goodbye. Pc rules. Lolz.”

I can never resist –

You can buy a near impossible to upgrade computer which is massively expensive for what you get and runs an editing system which is off on its own – or almost any other system, all much cheaper, all of which are infinitely upgradable, endlessly flexible, with a huge range of editing and associated software.

As the G-man says in Half-Life “Time To Choose…..”

Bernie

[Erik Lindahl]

Barefeats did some performance tests in Resolve yes:

https://www.barefeats.com/imac12p2.html

Seems the GF680MX is quite speedy after all.

I don’t however know exactly what you have to re-configure in Resolve to get it to work.

THE CUDA FIX
To get the Premiere Pro to recognize the iMac’s GeForce 680MX as a CUDA supported card, we edited the “approved” list in the app’s Contents folder. However, we also added it to the OpenCL supported cards list. Turns out that having it in both lists confuses Premiere Pro. When we removed it from the OpenCL list, Premiere Pro reported that it was using CUDA acceleration and the render times for Gaussian Blur and Fast Color Correction dropped. The same is true for the GeForce GT 650M in the Retina MacBook Pro. The graphs were updated accordingly on January 30th. Plus we added results for the GeForce G680 Classified as well.

[Geoff Addis]

Thank you, Erik

[Craig Seeman]

[Bernard Newnham] “You can buy a near impossible to upgrade computer “

With Thunderbolt I can use the same RAID or Video I/O on all my Macs (‘cept the overpriced MacPro). Just plug and play mostly. It’s a lot cheaper than buying a separate thing for each system.

Or maybe another way to put it, How many 4x PCIe slots does your Windows laptop have?

[Bernard Newnham]

“Or maybe another way to put it, How many 4x PCIe slots does your Windows laptop have?”

Absolutely none at all. But then, I haven’t edited seriously on a laptop since FCP1, when I was showing it off around the UK for the Royal Television Society. Though I can see that on very rare occasions one might need to edit on a laptop, I think comfy chairs, multiple screens, big speakers, lots of internal drives including SSDs, and hand-picked motherboards, graphics cards and processors are definitely the way to go.

I haven’t quite worked out a practical use for Thunderbolt yet, unless you happen to be lumbered with a closed system, like an iMac or laptop. I think the fact that I’ve just read two current PC magazines and only found one mention of Thunderbolt – it’s in some new GigaByte motherboard – means that the wider market aren’t too interested in it.

Bernie