[Douglas Morse]

The new iMacs (I have one) use Skylake chips, new chipsets, and updated AMD graphics cards. These drivers aren’t present in pre-El Capitain Code. However, the latest El Cap update does fix the most egregious errors with premiere pro. I just sunk and slammed down a rough cut of a 45 minute 4K piece in the past 2 weeks.

[Douglas Morse]

1. Rumor has it that there is a Mac Pro upgrade in your future. That said, I got the new iMac 5K and it’s a fantastic machine (cutting Pro-res Blackmagic 4K on it) It’s also a great value once you really look at what you are getting (5k wide Gamut screen, fastest NVRAM drives around and a 4GB Graphics card). You can get more power with either a Mackintosh or Windows machine( processors with more cores and even higher end video cards), but it will cost you and it won’t come with the amazing screen.

Right now, El Capitain and Premiere are not playing nice, but I am still able to edit and both Adobe and Apple are working on fixes. I would certainly get the iMac unless you ant to wait for an updated Mac Pro (and associated cost)

[Douglas Morse]

Well, with the latest El Capitain upgrade, it works, there are just some glitches here and there with the graphics rendering (specifically no full screen playback consistently). however, I haven’t had any crashes or lost work. (new iMac 5k)

[Douglas Morse]

I found a simple way to do it. I duplicated the menu, set the animated menu to first play, then I have it switch over to the secondary menu that has the still image on it. The buttons remain the same on both.

[Douglas Morse]

I have just finished a feature documentary in Premiere (and a fiction feature before that). Both primarily shot with various flavors of DSLR-s on both an iMac from 2010 and a 2014 Macbook Pro Retina. My current project size is around 45MB running about 1TB of footage of a USB3 drive that should be RAID, but is not. So I run into a few bottlenecks there, but not as many as you might suspect. Sometimes I have to wait for the drive to catch up and I have to render a few effects that I might not have to otherwise.

My project can take a couple of minutes to load all the footage. There are many, if not too many variables to your question. In general, you should see better performance, but Premiere does have bugs and can get hung up. So it is a question of both configuration and troubleshooting. In my experience, all editing programs have their strengths, weaknesses, and troubleshooting necessities. If you get it running right, it’s a great program and everything Final Cut Pro 8 should have been….

One thing to check is that you are running graphics acceleration Open CL if you have an AMD card. That said, if you are trying to edit RAW footage, that could be the MAJOR bottle neck. You can either transcode or run in reduced resolution — say 1/4. To find out how to do these things, please google.

[Douglas Morse]

The web drivers need to be modified as outlined in the Macrumors forum thread. For every minor update of Mac OSX, there is a new web driver released. It’s actually quite easy once you get the hang of it. I’m running without graphics glitches so far (fingers crossed)

[Douglas Morse]

Try these 4 options:

1. Upgrade your CUDA drivers

https://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html

2. Upgrade to Nvidia web driver. This thread on Macrumors USUALLY has up to date information and instructions https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1748213&page=3 Often someone will post a link to a modded file that will skip the system compatibility check and allow you to use it. If not, you need to do it manually. Easy actually.

you need to download the driver here https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/78853?ClickID=ayzyywk50wasw5osownsyayny5npwkvsysks

Copy the package to your desktop

Expand the .pkg From TERMINAL:

pkgutil –expand ~/Desktop/WebDriver-WebDriver-343.01.01f01 ~/Desktop/WebDriver
use text edit on ~/Desktop/WebDriver/Distribution
file on the line which contains the code

var found_hardware = 0
change to
var found_hardware = 1
(use the find command to find the line you need easily. Then save of course)

Delete old .pkg then run this command:

From Terminal
pkgutil –flatten ~/Desktop/WebDriver ~/Desktop/WebDriver-343.01.01f01.pkg

* If the web driver number changes to a newer version, you’ll need to change these references approriately.

Then of course double click on the file. It may not let you install it without another step. Open up system preferences security and there will be a box that says ‘install anyway’

3. Also install GFX Card status and keep you computer from switching graphics cards (you can also do this is the system control panel as well) https://gfx.io Go all nvidia dgpu when you are editing. Or if you are still experiencing problems, switch to integrated only until apple releases a fix.

4. SMC fan control is a nice little utility as well. Crank up the fans https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol and get some sweet Sony 7510s https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/758126-REG/Sony_MDR_7510_MDR_7510_Professional_Studio_Headphones.html

[Douglas Morse]

Melissa, you haven’t quite given us enough information to give you the best advice. For example, what is your budget? What kind of footage will you be editing? Some basic guidelines. Premiere works best with two monitors, and pretty much as large as possible. However, a laptop and an external monitor is a decent solution when traveling. The external monitors are inexpensive enough so you can have one in two locations without having to transport them. I am currently using an external monitor with a retina MacBook Pro and it’s a solid solution, though not as good as my previous setup with an iMac and external monitor.

Premiere also likes a dedicated gpu, especially if you are using compressed footage and also use basic and advanced effects. You should also go for 16gb of ram and the most hard drive you can afford. SSD is best, but the fusion drive is a good compromise. Media should also be on an external drive and a decent usb3 drive is okay for some types of footage. The more complex, the better drive and interface you will need.

An i7 processor is best if you will be compressing longer form media for the web as it will work much more efficiently. For shorter projects, you can get away with an i5. The air is underpowered for editing work — and the screen is simply too small. The imac is a better buy, unless you truly need the portability. It is too difficult to bring an iMac on an airplane.

[Douglas Morse]

As others have pointed out, Premiere supports hardware OpenCL acceleration — both on Nvidia AND AMD Cards. CUDA acceleration is an option INSTEAD of Open CL on Nvidia cards only. How much better CUDA is than OpenCL is debatable and probably not anything to worry about. With the AMD card you get hardware acceleration (which is only one part of the Mercury engine). Wait for real world reports, but my guess is that this is a monster. The 295X looks like a strong card. (but of course the next generation will be even better). The posts you are copying and pasting here have some misinformation.

[Douglas Morse]

New iMacs coming in a couple of weeks. Rumored to be 5k. Wait for that and then use trial versions of premiere pro 2014.1 also coming in a few weeks) and Final Cut Pro X — which is supposed to handle 4k well.