[John Davidson]

Great because nothing sucks worse than having a room full of quiet SSD computers and then plugging in one of those old jet engines. Can’t wait for ours to get here.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

The ONLY monitor anyone should buy with thunderbolt is the LG34UM one Bon Zelin was raving about at Nab.

No really. Go look it up. Available in about two weeks. More expensive, but compared to a Cinema Display it is awesome.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Call it what you want Steve, but I just ordered two from Small-Tree. Thanks!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Hey guys – stepping out of paternity leave to comment. Very interesting about the NFS mount – also saw the FCP.co discussion about it as well. For us, we just have more problems using NFS than solutions so we have kept to sparse disk images. It’s not elegant, but it’s been rock solid using Sparse over AFP for 2 years now.

Our NFS issues were that it kept crashing, freezing, and beach balling after a while with NFS. Add to that that adobe doesn’t render to NFS mounts (it freezes AE when you try) we just gave up and decided to stick with what works for now.

Interesting to see this develop though – maybe we’ll try again one of these days.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Just did this test. When the drive is totally empty it is faster. Don’t know why bare feats is different. The SSD on the iMac is the same speed as the one on the air. The MBPr SSD is the same speed as the Mac Pro.

iMac SSD just ain’t this fast.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

[Jason Jenkins] “Doesn’t the MBP max out at 2GB of video memory, 2.6 GHZ procs and 16 GB of memory? You can get an iMac with a 4GB video card, a 3.5 GHz proc and 32 GB of memory.”

Yes, but other benchmarks I’ve discovered (I have both) are:

-SSD speeds on MBPr hit a 1Gbps. iMac speeds top at around 700Mbps
-MBPr has HDMI out, that also handles 4k. iMac doesn’t.
-MBPr has Thunderbolt 2, iMac is Thunderbolt 1.

I have the rMBPr as my home office computer and the iMac at the office. The next MPBr update I’ll probably rotate the iMac to the staff, get a MPBr, and match it to that amazing super wide 4k Thunderbolt 2 LG display I’ve been drooling over.

The iMacs are great machines, but I just think the Macbook Pro Retina brings a little more to the table.

If you can want until WWDC in a week or two, who knows what might come out?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Here’s my performance ranking on best editing macs.

1. Mac pro – any flavor
2. Macbook pro 15 fully loaded and upgraded. I7. Ssd
3. Imac fully loaded – 27″i7. Ssd

Getting 2 or 3 above in less than fully loaded specs will affect performance, but probably not too badly.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

We tested it. It loads XML about 100 times faster now (5 seconds vs 20 minutes). It also no longer creates 100 layers in the Logic project.

Retiming still doesn’t come across though.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Well, try to avoid the Suicide Solution if you can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIgLA_J11dY&feature=kp

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

There are lots of things. The i7 processors, airplay to Apple TV’s, drive speeds (6G vs 3G) – basically all the small but cumulative improvements in the last few years make a huge difference.

But yeah, Thunderbolt is certainly a big plus!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.