[Daniel Frome]

Think of it this way… just stop caring about XML, audio levels, standard color correction .. in ANY of the top NLEs and you suddenly gain that same efficiency of FCPX 🙂

[Daniel Frome]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “The forum generally suffers from a lack of new points of view (ie attracting new participants).”

I’m probably adding to this problem. Daily lurker, rarely a poster. I don’t use FCPX, yet I still visit this forum daily. I know exactly all the same people who are going to say that FCPX is awesome, those who will say it sucks, and those who will write witty banter poking fun at the whole thing. It’s my daily distraction when I’m sending something out to playback.

[Daniel Frome]

Guilty.

[Daniel Frome]

[Michael Garber] ”
Geekbench single-core: 3609
Geekbench multi-core: 14452″

For comparison, my retina macbook pro, i7 quad core 2.6ghz:

Single Core: 2960 (Quad Mac Pro is 14% faster)
Multi Core: 11528 (Quad Mac Pro is 21% faster)

Some other food for thought: The Mac Pro’s CPU is mathematically 30% faster by pure numbers. Interesting law of diminishing returns that only delivers 14-21% increase in performance on a cpu test… probably ever lower in real-world usage. This has nothing to do with Apple, it’s just technology.

[Daniel Frome]

David, I had been meaning to ask you…

Put together a top of the line ProMax system and bench it. I’d like to see a mac pro + pegasus RAID price/performance vs a ProMax w/ built in RAID price/performance.

Especially on a 24 core ProMax system… I can dream.

[Daniel Frome]

Things to keep in mind:

1) The Adobe tests were done with 5K footage. FCPX tests were done with 4K footage. 4K RED footage plays back multiple times better on all NLEs, even RedRocket cards. So, the tests is highly biased.

2) Apple has enjoyed plenty of lead time, and does not have to worry about cross OS compatibility. So say that Apple enjoys an ‘easier’ codebase it’s an understatement. I think Apple will always have the early lead in performance, but Adobe will catch up for the most part.

3) Wait until you see an NLE perform on an equivalent PC workstation, especially with a high-end Nvidia card. CUDA still yields a performance gains in most software … I think a lot of this hype (well deserved, nonetheless) will die down once we see a ProMAX system beat the mac pro even with a single GPU.

[Daniel Frome]

Yes, nevermind other meaningful features, thank God they made it dual-gpu aware, because this is always the top priority of editors everywhere.

[Daniel Frome]

[Gary Huff] ” I would be worried that any MacPro configuration in the 4-core arena (and less than the D700) is going to show only marginal improvement (if any) in day-to-day operations over an iMac “

Well in many cases, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Editing software isn’t flooring the CPU/GPU constantly, and during all those times when cpu/gpu usage is moderate there just isn’t going to be a dramatic difference.

The mac pro will save you time when rendering/converting and or previewing effects. The majority of editing tasks are already “instant” in any modern NLE. It’s hard to get faster than “real time” as so much already works at.

[Daniel Frome]

[Kevin Patrick] “32 GB RAM (although it appears upgrading from 32 requires replacing all the DIMMS) “

I’ve been told that generally it’s good to have 2GB of RAM per core. With that in mind, if getting 32MB is really out of budget, you will have quite similar performance with 16GB in most cases.

[Daniel Frome]

If rendering is your primary gig, then more cores are better, but I’ll take a guess and say that the 6 core config will be the fastest option for video editors. 6 cores is already plenty CPU horsepower, with the clock speed ultimately making the most difference in day-to-day editing tasks.