will the iMac 5K Retina’s AMD Radeon graphics card be a problem for Premiere Pro CC and AE???

[Walter Biscardi]

Nvidia is NO LONGER required for high performance with Adobe apps. Hasn’t been for two years at least. Adobe supports Open GL just the same as CUDA. If you were at NAB this past April you would have seen the latest AMD cards in a Dell screaming with 6k footage in Adobe Premiere Pro running with Open GL.

The problem with the iMac, as least as far as we can tell, is that there’s only 4GB RAM on the graphics card to drive that display and help drive the performance of software such as Adobe Premiere Pro. It might work out perfectly fine, but many of us are scratching our heads wondering why an 8GB AMD card is not an option. According to Apple specs, there’s some other processor in there to drive the display, but we’re suspect until we see a real world test.

I think the iMac is the best machine for editing on Apple, but I’m not lining up to buy this machine. I’m continuing to look at PC workstations to replace the rest of my Mac Pros. We have two 27″ iMacs currently cutting in two of our edit suites and while they work great, they do get very hot. This new machine has a very impressive screen, but the rest of it just doesn’t “wow” me at all. I can get some gorgeous widescreen LG screens along with a power packed PC for about the same or a little more than this iMac plus have the ability to expand, upgrade the PC later.

This machine seems more focused on wowing the production world with a “5k screen” instead of putting more horsepower behind that screen which would make it even more useful. If someone wants to take one for a test spin and tell us it can easily drive the screen and provide a lot of realtime punch for Premiere Pro, I’ll reconsider. But on paper, I’m not lining up to buy this computer.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

Craft and Career Advice & Training from real Working Creative Professionals

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[Nicholas Natteau]

Dear Walter,

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain all of this to me. Having just placed an order for such an iMac a few days ago, I’m now wondering whether I shouldn’t cancel it, after reading your post. My reason for initially ordering one was because I work a lot with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign as well as PPCC and AE. So the prospect of being able to see everything razor sharp (images and text) was what motivated me. But not if Premiere Pro and AE would choke working on an iMac Retina.

I’m not planning on delivering 4K (much less 5K) any time soon. But I shoot 4K essentially for the creative freedom it gives me in post when mastering in 1080p. If the iMac Retina 5K works as least as well as my 2012 iMac i7 in Premiere Pro CC and AE CC, then I’m sold. But if (on an iMac Retina 5K) those CC programs can’t handle editing 4K footage or basic effects in a 1080p timeline, then that would be a deal breaker.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Nicholas Natteau] “I’m not planning on delivering 4K (much less 5K) any time soon. But I shoot 4K essentially for the creative freedom it gives me in post when mastering in 1080p. If the iMac Retina 5K works as least as well as my 2012 iMac i7 in Premiere Pro CC and AE CC, then I’m sold. But if (on an iMac Retina 5K) those CC programs can’t handle editing 4K footage or basic effects in a 1080p timeline, then that would be a deal breaker.
“

I guess you’ll be the first to tell us how it works. We are already shooting, cutting and delivering 4k UHD. The 2 year old iMacs in the shop are capable of cutting with it no problem, just can’t do a lot of effects and render times are slow. I’m looking for machines that can cut well today and I can upgrade them as we move forward like I’ve done with my older Mac Pros. Right now PCs seems more cost effective today and for expansion than what Apple is offering.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

Craft and Career Advice & Training from real Working Creative Professionals

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[Michael Hendrix]

I agree Walter about the head scratching. It doesn’t seem like they took that much of a step forward. The one thing they did upgrade was the Thunderbolt ports to Thunderbolt 2. That will help with the pipeline a bit.

[Walter Soyka]

I agree with everything Walter B. said above.

I started transitioning to PCs three years ago and as a long-time Mac user and infrequent PC user, I was quite surprised at how outdated and wrong my perceptions of the PC platform were. HP sent me an evaluation unit which I wrote about here a bit and liked enough to buy several more. It turns out that PCs are a totally valid choice for daily creative work.

I also wanted to note a typo above: Premiere Pro is using OpenCL for acceleration, not OpenGL (a different technology).

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Morten]

Guess you could run the display at not full resolution when using the video apps.

Regarding getting PC’s instead of Macs, just be sure you do not rely on ProRes for your output.

– No Parking Production –

Adobe CC2014, 3 x MacPro, 3 x MbP, Ethernet File Server w. Areca ThunderRaid 8

[Walter Soyka]

[Morten Ranmar] “Regarding getting PC’s instead of Macs, just be sure you do not rely on ProRes for your output.”

There are some third-party ProRes-compatible solutions which may be options, as well as the Apple ProRes dongle [link].

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Biscardi]

[Morten Ranmar] “Regarding getting PC’s instead of Macs, just be sure you do not rely on ProRes for your output.”

ProRes output via PC is now possible. Also super easy to simply play out a timeline to a digital 4k recorder to ProRes. ProRes is not a showstopper for PC anymore.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

Craft and Career Advice & Training from real Working Creative Professionals

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[Nicholas Natteau]

Thanks again Walter and everyone else who replied to my post.

I happened to ask the same question on “nofilmschool.com”, and one poster said the following regarding the iMac Retina 5K and Premiere Pro CC and AE:

Truly hard to know without getting your hands on it. So I’m just going by experience on high end Dell’s and HPs with CC. Simply playing and cutting 4k shouldn’t necessarily be a problem, depending on how much footage you’re dealing with. 15 minutes vs hours makes a big difference, which is where 8 GBs of ram would be a major roadblock.

Can’t see anyone seriously attempting to edit anything of significance on the minimum specs.
However, Premiere is a completely different animal with or without the Mercury engine, which means you need Nvidia. So “software-only” Premiere is going to crumble dealing with AMD. You’re pretty much stuck using FCP on this, unless they offer Nvidia as an upgrade in the future.

This thing, in any configuration is NOT designed around Adobe at all, if they’re going to ignore Nvidia. Its really that simple. Marketing got their hands around it and said in no uncertain terms, “we want people using Apple products on an Imac”. Photoshop, InDesign and AI should be more than fine, but video…sorry folks. Don’t waste your time. The specs are a borderline starter system, pretty low end even when you max is out, except for the display. But even then, what is the GUI going to look like? The scaling better be top notch. It has to be.

Selling a “real” pro on this is fairly laughable. Image editing? Awesome!!! Video or effects or 3D? Sorry guys, this is NOT going to cut it. No Nvidia, limited RAM options, and a single i7? Move along folks.

Pros look at this… https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/z840.html
or
https://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-T7600/pd
or
build your own.

Doing any video editing at all on the iMac Retina 5K via Premiere Pro sounds like a pretty bleak prospect if that fellow is correct. Is he? Would it be really that bad?

I can only speak from my own experience using Premiere Pro and AE on my maxed out 2012 iMac i7, and I never had any issues.
But according to that post, it sounds like editing video on a 5K iMac Retina would be a massive leap backwards. Say it ain’t so! Because the screen does look gorgeous…thinking of photos and text here.

I’m hoping that I would just be able to edit 4K video in a 1080p timeline smoothly, do color correction, grading, basic animation, basic compositing, no 3D work of any kind. So being able to do all of this in Premiere, Speedgrade, and AE without these programs choking is just as important to me as sharp images and sharp text.

[Tero Ahlfors]

I’ve edited a bunch of 4K-6K stuff on iMacs. It’s not the end of the world unless you’re doing something insanely effects heavy. If you need real time full quality playback with dozen effects then you need to spend a bit.