[Keith Moreau]

Every time I use my MacPro 2008 8 Core for intense tasks, like video editing using Premier Pro CS5.5 with native AVCHD files, I wish Apple would release a new Mac Pro. I’m willing to plunk down big bucks for a modern Mac Pro. It doesn’t have to be in a new chassis, it would be nice if it had Thunderbolt and if Apple does release a new Mac Pro, it will.

I am hopeful that Apple’s delay in producing a Mac Pro is the need to be able to run the newest modern server-class Intel CPUs, the Xeon E5-2600 server class chips that can be chained together in dual CPU mode. From the very beginning the Mac Pro line’s mid to higher end models had dual-cpu capability.

It is hopeful to me that even Dell and HP have not yet produced towers with these dual CPU chips yet, this means that Apple might be in the same situation, having just received the first shipments of these in March or perhaps prototypes prior to that, even if they had pre-designed new Mac Pros for these chips based on specs, they still needed to install them and test them and manufacture new Mac Pros. Who knows what issues these new chips introduced and had to be worked out by all the manufactures that use them.

What is a bit frustrating is that Apple, at least on the Mac Pro line, has been silent as to their plans. They seem to be occasionally willing to ‘pre announce’ devices in their iOS line, such as new iPads, iPhones but not their computers, never have, and probably never will.

So I, and probably thousands, or tens of thousands of people like me, are patiently waiting for Apple to come out with their new Mac Pro line. I am hoping Apple is waiting for actual releases of the Dell T7600 and similar PCs from other manufacturers to announce shipping of Mac Pros, this would be a shrewd business strategy, considering their enmity since Michael Dell said that the best thing Apple could do for their shareholders would be to sell cash in Apple and return the money to investors. Releasing a new ultra Mac Pro would really undercut other PC manufacturers. When Apple releases new models of Mac Pros they tend to be a pretty good deal and quite powerful relative to PCs of the same build. It is just a bit perplexing why Apple didn’t release interim Mac Pro’s for the past 2 years, as chips have gotten a bit faster and better. That part is disturbing.

Anyway, this is my last hope for a Mac Pro an if they don’t come out with one in the next couple of months my next Mac pro might be a (perish the thought…) PC!

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks John

Do you know how much faster the 580 is than the 4000? I would ‘try’ it out, but I’m always trying to eek out the last bit of performance out of my aging Mac Pro. If new ones come out soon, I can transfer it over to the new one, hopefully, or if Apple kills the Mac Pro line and I go the PC route, use it in that.

What card do you use?

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the helpful response, Cliff.

With regard to Premiere Pro and 10.7.3: Did you notice any change between 10.7.2 and 10.7.3? Any improvements? Any things working less well?

The Mac Premiere Pro users probably need to get together and create some type of place where we can put our heads together and work out the pitfalls, tricks and workarounds of Mac + Premiere Pro as we are obviously in the minority on this and the Adobe Premiere Pro forums. There is a lot of complaining on Mac-specific problems but not often a lot of real help available, though again I applaud Todd and others of Adobe in at least commenting on Mac issues when they are posted.

It seems there are pretty varied experiences with the combo, though in general, it seems that Mac users of Premiere Pro want it to be better and are frustrated by varying degrees of instability.

I’m heartened to hear that you had it working reasonably well on such a large project. One thing that I’m trying to do, for the most part, is to NOT transcode and use the material natively, which is one of Premiere Pro’s strong points. My Mac is pretty old, a 2008 3,1 model, and I feel it might be getting too underpowered to handle much of the AVCHD / H.264 encoded source material I’m throwing at it. Are you transcoding prior to importing into Premiere Pro, or importing native? What is the majority of the files’ codecs you’re importing?

Again, thanks, very helpful.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks Todd, I did see this issue in the forum (the only one about 10.7.3 I saw, but didn’t care that much since I never crop using Media Encoder. I guess what I’m looking for is more stability than what PPro CS 5.5.2 + Mac OS 10.7.2 is currently giving me and hoping an upgrade to 10.7.3 would help in this regard.

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond, Todd, your contribution, as an Adobe employee, to help address customer issues directly in these and other forums is one of the main advantages of Premiere Pro over other solutions, and I applaud Adobe for give you the freedom and direction to do this.

I guess I’d still like to put out a call to any Mac user that has actually upgraded from 10.7.2 to 10.7.3 and what their assessment is.

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Cliff, have you upgraded your Lion to 10.7.3? I pretty much had to because I’m on a couple very large monitors and I was getting the laggy timeline issue with 10.6.8 (that Tom doesn’t seem to experience) and heard that the 10.7 update resolved this – and it does.

Thanks for any information.

[Keith Moreau]

Good to know Tom. Would you mind upgrading to 10.7.3 and report your findings ? 🙂

[Keith Moreau]

If you got .mov files you got files that have most likely been transcoded from the native files (which are files that end in .MP4). The EX file structure has a lot of other metadata along with it but the media files are .MP4 and encoded with mpeg2 compression. It seems possible that these files are some flavor of Prores.

If you’re on a Mac with FCP installed you should be able to use the .movs, if you are on Windows, it might be more difficult to work with them, but possible if you have the correct quicktime codecs installed.

[Keith Moreau]

It seems the vaunted Mercury Playback engine could conform audio realtime with it’s eyes closed, another item for the wish list. We basically don’t want to have to wait for any thing, even those audio waveform files either. Maybe an option if you really need to get more performance, but if you have a fast machine, which you most likely would have if you got Premiere Pro for the MPE, just do it all realtime!

[Keith Moreau]

If you have a 2 monitor setup, you can use the 2nd monitor as a output device, this is under the program window menu, playback settings, you can choose that monitor.

If you do that, then you can see what is playing in the timeline on the 2nd monitor, there isn’t anything else, no controls, just the video that the timeline is putting out.

You can then, on your main monitor, use the program monitor window to display scopes real time. I use this a lot for real time monitoring of scopes. It’s just silly that PPro doesn’t allow this without this workaround. However, I don’t think their scopes part is very efficient, and this setup can result in occasionally bogging down my computer. It gets worse when put in 1 or more color correction filters, even CUDA enabled filters using a CUDA card. This also needs to be optimized as it seems that the CUDA isn’t used as effectively as it could be to play back the real time renders. I also think it has to do with what codec you’re trying to play back, for example AVCHD uses a lot of CPU, Prores wouldn’t.

Another annoying thing in general is the RGB parade scope doesn’t display anything about 100 IRE, where as the Luma scope does. So you kind of have use the 3-up scopes of Luma, RGB parade, and vector to see what’s happening in the superwhites, which also may bog down the computer.

Hope this helps.

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

I have a Sony FS100. In 1080 60P LPCM audio mode, it doesn’t think there is an audio track, it does work with AC3 audio in that mode as well as LPCM in all other modes. Not sure if this is related to your problem but is is a NX cam issue.