[Joe Marler]

[Walter Soyka] “If GPUs are “melting down,” it is a hardware problem, period. Electronics generate resistive heat when they are used, and the harder you push them, the hotter they get. If a design does not accommodate this fact, it is flawed. The system should stay in a safe operation range and be prevented from entering an unsafe state by design.

We’ve had thermal throttling in hardware for decades. The hardware itself enforces that performance slow-down to keep itself safely cool, and it should shut down completely before it ever reaches the point where the heat would be damaging.”

As a former hardware designer, that is generally correct. You don’t blame software for that, for two reasons: (1) The nMP cooling should be designed to handle extremely intense long duration combined CPU and GPU loads without even throttling. (2) If unforeseen conditions occur it should protect itself.

You should be able to run simultaneous instances of Prime95 and GPU stress tests like Furmark at the highest setting for days and not cause any problem — and those are synthetic tests. If running actual production software causes hardware damage from overheating, I don’t see any possible excuse for blaming the software, beta or otherwise.

It could be a manufacturing issue with thermal compound or assembly or a firmware issue with fan speed control. It was a GPU that failed, and if on a PC workstation you could possibly blame the GPU fans — it’s a separate pluggable subsystem. But the nMP GPUs don’t have separate fans — Apple is totally responsible for cooling. The nMP firmware has to read the GPU-provided thermal data and provide the needed level of cooling. If that didn’t work right the GPU itself should throttle to prevent damage.

Even automobiles have had thermal throttling for years. The ECU reads many sensors and does whatever is necessary to maintain safe thermodynamic margin — richen mixture, retard timing, etc. That is why the engine can feel sluggish when ambient temps are high.

[Joe Marler]

[Oliver Peters] “AMD showed some really nice GPU cards at NAB that are only PC-compatible for now. If you have an old tower, Sapphire 7950 is about as good as you can go with a “blessed” AMD card. You get a high-end Nvidia (that’s what they edited with on “Gone Girl”) or a flashed Nvidia gaming card. Expansion chassis don’t really help you much for editing if you have a nMP. So a lot of us are stuck.”

Back in 2012 when the nMP was designed, Apple may have not foreseen how rapidly 4K would proliferate in post and the huge jump in GPU performance from moving to 14/16 nm fabrication this year.

Usually both CPU and GPUs only increase at 10-15% per generation. If Apple planned around that and the nMP as released had excellent performance on a mostly HD workflow, then you could see (from the 2012 design perspective) maybe 5-6 years is OK and customers will just replace it.

The problem is 4K (esp H264) is very common and Premiere can struggle with this. Unexpectedly AMD and nVidia are releasing 14/16 nanometer GPUs which promise up to 250% performance increase. People on the nMP are sort of stuck. It does OK on FCPX but not everybody runs that. Does Apple want to limit nMP hardware sales to people running FCPX? I doubt it.

It appears that major performance improvements in Premiere, AE and Photoshop are at hand from Adobe using Metal, so that might help soften the blow for those on the nMP. However it will be very interesting to see if Apple modifies their “sealed box” philosophy when the updated nMP is released.

You can sort of write off an iMac and replace it more frequently but a Mac Pro is more expensive and the repercussions of a non-upgradeable design are more severe.

[Joe Marler]

[Tom Sefton] “So my rambling question is – if you can edit and playback 6K footage with a current new mac pro, what extra does more budget give you with a PC?”

Because you are doing this with FCPX, not Premiere CC. There can be a huge performance difference, although this varies widely by codec. Maybe a fairly high-end Dell workstation is needed (today) for Premiere to have the same performance as a nMP running FCPX on the same codec and editing tasks.

In your specific case you might be OK. But a Premiere shop might be forced to use a PC workstation, which undercuts Apple’s main goal in this product segment — selling Macs. It doesn’t matter how good FCPX is or how fast it runs on a Mac if the customers are using Premiere or Avid. They simply have to get the hardware that fulfills their performance needs, and if that takes them away from Apple, then Apple may have lost them as a customer forever. As Premiere performance further improves, this reduces the PC hardware cost to equal a Mac’s performance and makes moving off Apple even easier.

[Joe Marler]

[Robert d'Alexis] “This guy is a Mac editor working with a powerful PC for this one project involving native 6K footage.”

The GPU in his PC (nVidia Quadro M6000 12GB) costs more than my entire top-spec 2015 iMac 27. This illustrates the configuration freedom on the PC side where you can just keep throwing hardware at the task until it runs fast enough.

On the Dell web site I roughly spec’d out his 18-core Dell Precision 7910 system, and it’s about $27k. It’s hugely powerful but very expensive — well over double the price of a top-spec Mac Pro. But it’s a feature film directed by Scott Waugh and starring Josh Hartnett, so they can probably afford it.

While FCPX is generally faster than Premiere CC in areas like render performance, export, frame rate and JKL lag on H264 4k, this doesn’t matter if the job requires Premiere or Avid. They aren’t using H264 anyway. In that situation Apple is at a real disadvantage in the workstation arena, especially with the semi-closed nMP design. Toward the end of a design cycle the nMP is way behind. Maybe you don’t need that performance on FCPX but it is very much needed on Premiere and it’s very available — you just write a check, buy the workstation, and it works great.

Furthermore Adobe is making significant performance upgrades to Premiere and AE and when implemented, that high-end Dell workstation will become even faster, further opening the gap to the nMP. Apple had better get on the ball if they want to compete in the workstation area.

You could argue the total revenue from all software and hardware related to Mac Pro doesn’t warrant a continuing rapid development tempo, but that’s like saying how much total revenue does GM get from the Corvette. It’s a halo product and presence or absence of that has a knock-on effect to company image and across the entire product line.

[Joe Marler]

[Andrew Kimery] ” I wish Apple would put a desktop GPU in the top of the line iMac but I understand why they don’t (then it really would be way too close in performance to the top of the line nMP).”

Aside from further cannibalizing Mac Pro sales, it’s not currently feasible to put a full-size GPU in the exiting iMac form factor. Even if the iMac was twice as thick it wouldn’t be possible. A full-size GPU can pull 250 watts all by itself. My top-spec 2015 iMac 27 pulls about 155 watts under heavy load — I’ve measured it.

Apple would have to put a hugely bigger power supply in, totally change the cooling, acoustics, make the case a lot bigger — in short it would look more like a 2005 iMac G5: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Apple_iMac_G5_side_rear_view-2005-05-16.jpg

They would obviously not do that for all the iMacs so now we’re talking about a new more expensive special iMac just for that fairly narrow usage case.

Interestingly MSI just introduced such an all-in-one PC, called the MSI Gaming 27XT. It is twice the weight of an iMac 27, consumes 2-3 times the power, is about four times as thick depending on how you measure it — and looks like a monstrosity: https://media.bestofmicro.com/2/X/549609/gallery/Gaming-27XT_05_w_600.png

This year both AMD and nVidia will introduce GPUs using 14/16nm fabrication which will roughly double the performance per watt. This should allow the existing iMac design to have double the GPU performance and a Mac Pro refresh (if they do one) could be a lot faster on the GPU side. From a performance standpoint everyone may get what they want, sooner than we once thought and without adding a “FrankenMac” to the lineup.

[Joe Marler]

[Steve Connor] “Some nice additions there! I look forward to seeing more detail However I really hope this has improved performance with 4K XAVC.”

It’s not just 4K XAVC, it’s any 4K H264 I have tested. In my tests Premiere CC’s frame rate when fast forwarding in an H264 4K timeline is about 20 times slower than FCPX on the same hardware, a top-spec 2015 iMac 27. Keyboard lag to JKL input is also much slower.

It appears Adobe is working hard on performance improvements. Having built-in proxy support will be a huge plus. They are apparently adding Quick Sync hardware-accelerated H264 encode/decode (Windows only unfortunately). Last year Adobe demonstrated some huge performance improvements with After Effects on OS X by using Apple’s Metal API, and they said this would also be used in Illustrator and Photoshop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp1aPgLx4RQ

They did not mention Lightroom which really needs these improvements; I hope it gets them.

I assume these will be rolled out soon. Premiere already has hardware-accelerated H265 encoding with some GPUs, which FCPX does not have. Ironically on my iMac Premiere handles H265 faster than H264 which is illogical considering how much more compute-intensive H265 is.

[Joe Marler]

[Sam Lee] “…However I will bet your investment in 4K now will have very little return of investment. To me it’s an optional luxury now if you have the cash flow…I’d wait for this 4K fad to pass and get into 8K…For 8K to really take off and be an accepted standards, pretty much the entire workflow chain (cam lens, cam, storage, transmission) has to be also affordable. So far I think a 8K rated lens will be well over $150K…I’m not even in any hurry to jump into 4K at all. There’s just not a huge demand for it…Biggest problem on current 4K cams is the lack of a super telephoto lens…”

There are lots of advantages to shooting and editing in 4K, even if final distribution is HD. The entire chain does not have to be 4K or 8K to realize these advantages. You can recompose shots in post, pan/zoom, plus punch in to give the illusion of a 2nd camera, etc. Here is a simple demo shot with a single *stationary* Panasonic GH4 which illustrates this: https://vimeo.com/channels/humcrush/101051502

Another advantage is ability to take frame grabs and use them for stills. The below magazine covers are all video frame grabs, not photos from a still camera: https://www.red.com/shot-on-red/photography

Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, English Patient, Cold Mountain) discussed these advantages in this interview from 06:00 to 09:30: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1744-part-two-walter-murch-talks-4k-and-beyond

That said, good quality 1080p is *really* good. It is unlikely most customers on most 1080p playback devices will notice between 4k and 1080p content. It doesn’t make sense to jump to 4K knee-jerk fashion because it’s the “in thing”. It requires more data handling and editing software is more sluggish (some more than others).

However there are some exceptions. For aerial videography we have noticed a major improvement from 4K vs 1080p when viewed at 1080p playback. This is using the DJI Phantom Vision 3 Pro. I don’t know if the prior aerial platforms were not really delivering 1080 or if the subject type (trees, leaves, etc) just favors 4K.

In some cases lens zoom ranges can be more limited on 4K cameras, but my documentary group has had no problem with this. The Panasonic AG-DVX200 has a great fixed lens that covers a wide range. The Sony A7RII can be cropped to Super35 which improves reach and has no downside to image quality — in fact it’s better in that mode.

To my knowledge everything broadcast by ABC, FOX, ESPN, and A&E is exclusively 720p/60. So it’s not like you must have 4K to look good. But if you are considering new equipment purchases and the incremental cost for 4K is modest and you have knowledgeably evaluated the cost and benefits, in some cases 4K can make sense even for HD distribution.

[Joe Marler]

I use ColorMunki Photo on my Windows PC and various Macs. It works fine. There was a bug exclusive to the 2015 retina iMac 27 if you upgraded from an old version of ColorMunki software. In this case the color calibration was visually way off. It was supposedly because of the new LED illumination used by the 2015 retina screen, combined with some mis-handled old ColorMunki files during the upgrade. New installs should not have that problem. If anyone encounters this, contact X-Rite technical support.

If you don’t need printer matching, the ColorMunki Display version is cheaper and does the same thing as ColorMunki Photo.

The ideal solution is having a high-end hardware-calibrated monitor, but color profiling tools From DataColor and X-Rite are affordable and a big improvement over nothing.

[Joe Marler]

[Chad Smith] “Hi Joe. Do you use an external 4K monitor? I am looking to upgrade and wondering if I can send 4K hdmi to one monitor and 1080 HD to my grading monitor at the same time with bmd 4K io box”

I do not. For a while I used my 2013 iMac 27 in Target Display Mode as a 2nd monitor. That was using its native 2560 x 1440 resolution. It was OK and I considered getting an Apple 27″ Thunderbolt display but I personally like using a single (large) screen. I understand about using a separate grading monitor and BMD interface but I calibrate my iMac with ColorMunki and just use that. I have not examined the multi-monitor limitations of a 2015 iMac 27 beyond what I already mentioned.

As I just stated in this post, if you can wait until the end of this year we expect there will be a major GPU upgrade in the Mac lineup. If it also includes Thunderbolt 3 or an upgraded screen timing controller it could alter any current multi-monitor limitations: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/42507#42508

[Joe Marler]

For a while I had both top-spec 2013 and 2015 iMac 27s used for editing 1080p and UHD 4k H264 video. They both do OK, however for smoothest performance transcoding to proxy helps. I have edited four-camera H264 4k multicam with no problems. My media is on an 8TB Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt RAID. I now use only the 2015 model.

However certain 4k effects can take a lot longer to render — there is 4x the data so this is expected. Computationally-intensive effects like Neat Video take forever.

The 2015 retina screen is much better, especially on text. But subjectively I didn’t notice a big performance improvement between 2013 and 2015 models. However I ran benchmarks which showed some differences; see results:

https://joema.smugmug.com/Computers/IMac27BenchmarksVsOthers/n-hR5wtF/i-3mL6T5r/A

Re image quality of 4k I don’t see much difference between UHD 4k shot with a Sony A7RII or Panasonic AG-DVX200 vs H264 1080p shot in-camera with a Canon 5D Mark III. Good quality 1080 shot with a good lens using good technique is hard to beat, especially since most distribution is 1080p at most.

That said 4k gives a lot more editorial options. You can reframe the shot in post, add pan/zoom motions, do fake camera cuts by punching in, etc. Each 4k frame is an 8 megapixel still so sometimes frame grabs are usable as photos.

FCPX allows using 4k content in a 1080p project without losing the underlying resolution. This improves performance by using 1080-size render and temp files, but if you zoom in the underlying 4k is still there.

I don’t think there’s a huge improvement in image quality of 1080p content vs 4k content when viewed on a 1080p screen. However aside from this there are still compelling reasons to shoot 4k.

I would not suggest upgrading from a 2013 to a 2015 iMac 27 just for 4k editing. The main thing which enables smooth 4k H264 editing is transcoding to proxy, which fortunately is built in to FCPX and works very well.

Both AMD and nVidia are finally upgrading their fabrication to 14/16nm, so this year we expect GPUs will have an approx. 200% performance increase. These will possibly be used in the iMac refresh late this year, and also the refreshed Mac Pro (whenever that is). GPU performance only helps certain elements of editing — many are and will remain CPU or I/O constrained. However as developers increasingly leverage GPU horsepower for more things, having a faster one can help. Unlike previous incremental CPU and GPU upgrades, this is a major one so anyone contemplating a purchase might consider waiting until later this year:
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/07/new-graphics-amd-nvidia/