Upgrade a 2013 trash can Mac Pro

[Robert Olding]

Hi Xavier,

I use a 2013 Mac Pro (Tube/Trash) can to edit 4K everyday. I’ve seen those upgrades at OWC but haven’t taken advantage of them. My Mac Pro has 32GB of RAM, it’s internal drive is only 256GB and the GPU is the FirePro D500

My set up relies on external Thunderbolt 2 drives that I’ve purchased from OWC. I have two ThunderBay 4 RAID with 24TB in each. One stores all my documents and files, the other is a Time Machine backup of everything. I also have a OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual as a scratch/cache drive. It has two OWC 480GB SDD drives in it that I RAID together.

I edit with FCPX and color grade with DaVinci Resolve.

[Xavier Paredes]

Hi Robert,

I neglected to mention in my original post that one of the main reasons I’m considering upgrading my trash can mac is because of the very slow encode times I’ve been experiencing lately.

For example, Adobe Media Encoder becomes very slow if I have a few layers with some effects. A couple of days ago I had to add audio waves (these waves) to a 29-minute video in After Effects and when I compressed it to MP4 using Adobe Media Encoder it took exactly 4 hours, 59 minutes. That’s 10 times real-time!

So I’m wondering if upgrading my Mac to a 12-Core Xeon plus the 1 TB SSD is worth it. Or if I am better off using those ~$900 towards one of the new—but very expensive —Mac Pros next year (by that time the Mac Pros will probably have Apple Silicone too).

Anyone having gone down this path please share your experience.

Thanks!

[Eric Santiago]

We still have a few D700s and I own one for home topped at 64GB RAM.

Those little pills are workhorses.

[Joe Marler]

I formerly owned a top-spec D700 12-core Mac Pro. It’s a good machine for ProRes, but if decoding or encoding 4k H264, it will be slow on AME, Premiere, FCPX or any other NLE. The machine has no hardware acceleration since Xeon doesn’t have Quick Sync. In theory the AMD GPUs have an early version of AMD’s UVD/VCE, but I don’t know if any software used that version.

Even if it had Quick Sync, in general Adobe software has been very slow to adopt that or other acceleration methods — especially for decoding. For encoding Premiere started using it more recently and the very latest version supposedly uses nVidia and AMD encode acceleration, but only for Windows.

I just re-tested Premiere 14.5 on my Vega 64 10-core iMac Pro, and it is very sluggish on playback of 4k 8-bit 4:2:0 H264. However for *encode* to 8-bit 4:2:0 H264, Premiere 14.5 (and other recent versions) is pretty fast, at least on the Macs I’ve tested (which were all equipped with either Quick Sync or T2 acceleration).

You are facing several problems: (1) Your 2013 Mac Pro has no hardware decode/encode acceleration (2) It’s only a 4-core machine, so when Premiere or AME falls back to software-only encode, it’s CPU-limited (3) Although your main problem is encoding, Premiere is also generally very sluggish at decode (ie playback) of 4k H264 on Macs, due to not using hardware acceleration.

Doing a 12-core OWC upgrade on your Mac Pro would at least give a lot more CPU power, so it reasonably might be 2x or 3x faster at software-based H264 encoding, IOW 2 hr vs 5 hr.

If you have access to any other non-Xeon machine — Windows or Mac — it’s possible you could export a ProRes file from AME, copy it to that machine, then transcode to H264 using Handbrake. That two-step process would likely be faster. Even a three-year-old MacBook Pro 15 might encode to H264 faster than your Xeon-based Mac Pro.

That said, the OWC upgrade looks pretty cost effective and might enable you to stretch that machine a while longer.

Your question is essentially an AME performance issue. If there is some AME config or optimization possible, you’d probably get a more informed answer on an Adobe forum.