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12 core Mac Pro 2012 or Imac 2015? need help
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Uncompressed 4K video can easily exceed 1000MB/s, so SATA3 cannot handle that alone at all. Even the "lowest end" uncompressed at 8-bit YUV at 23.98fps, you're still talking about 500MB/s for just one stream... hardly practical for real world usage on a single SATA3.
If you meant working with higher end compressed formats like ProRes 4444, then it's much more reasonable at around 160MB/s for a single stream. But even then, 3 layers in editing will already slow it down to a slow crawl.
I work with these formats quite a bit. ProRes 4444 is good for practically anything out there, from theatrical to broadcast. Uncompressed 4K workflows aren't mostly even touched by studios and networks because of the storage speed/size requirements.
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My single 840pro 512gb is very slow) around 40-45 second with gtx 980
Hmmm. It shouldn't take that long. How long have you had it?
Yes in general you wouldn't use long uncompressed 4K footage, especially if the images are highly detailed with a great range of colour. The files I'm doing system tests with are about 25 seconds long max and fortunately they don't come close to saturating SATA 3 because they are not long enough. They can be put together for fast cutting sequences quite well. But even those short tiny clips struggle to play back smooth in QuickTime player from even the fastest XP941 or SM951 SSD on a X5690 processor with GTX980 (In Premiere and After Effects they play fine after pre-rendering only). That's why these old CPUs are tough to recommend when Skylake is now a choice. The new iMac also has a tremendous screen. Apple could easily dump the Mac Pro line as the iMac is now beginning to enjoy professional features that used to cost so much money.
A guy with a new Titan-X wrote me that his playback was choppy with a 4K QT file.
He sent me a sample and I tried in 4,1. Using the fastest SM951 (1,500) and Titan X it was only OK if I used the 3.46Ghz CPUs (6 or 12)
If I slid in the chassis with 2.66, it became a slideshow. I think that this is where 4,1 hits the wall. My rMBP had less trouble, but it wasn't connected to a 4K display so it was downscaled somewhat, but pretty obvious the CPU had an advantage.
He sent me a sample and I tried in 4,1. Using the fastest SM951 (1,500) and Titan X it was only OK if I used the 3.46Ghz CPUs (6 or 12)
If I slid in the chassis with 2.66, it became a slideshow. I think that this is where 4,1 hits the wall. My rMBP had less trouble, but it wasn't connected to a 4K display so it was downscaled somewhat, but pretty obvious the CPU had an advantage.
I'm only having choppy playback with H264 AVC HD codec. the Apple prores444 playback is fine. (i tried 1 min sample, which was around 7gb recorded with backmagic camera). Also with another players from appstore the same h264 plays fine. so I think the problem into the software.
Hey SoyCapitan! I like the name!
You're comments don't exactly make sense. Video, by nature, is incompressible data, read as large sequential data. So regardless of the length of the video clip, the data-rate will be immediately applicable upon playback, whether its 5 seconds or 10 minutes per file. A single uncompressed 4K video file will stutter almost immediately upon playback on SATA3.
Also, if you are working in pure uncompressed, it actually is putting far less demands on the CPU as the CPU doesn't have to decode on the fly. I can play an uncompressed 4K stream at 23.98fps fine on my cMP from the SM951 and x5690 completely fine as the SM951 is fast enough for the sustained read and the x5690 is fast enough for the codec. It's when you are working with a compressed codec (which practically everyone would) where suddenly a CPU matters more. You trade off sustained data-rate reads with increased CPU power to decode on the fly. That's why something like H.264 can be harder to play back on older systems... even though it's data rate is easily handled by SATA3 many times over, it takes far more CPU power to decode it in real-time. Hence why so many companies have come out with hardware H.264 encoder/decoders for older systems.
But with high-end iFrame codecs like ProRes, you get a very sensible tradeoff between data-rate, size, compression and quality. Which is why it is widely used in acquisition and video editing of high-end material. It maintains the quality of uncompressed with more reasonable data-rates that can play on SATA3 fine, all the while requiring less CPU power to decode (in this case a CMP Xeon can easily handle).
It sounds to me like you are working with some sort of compressed codec.
See my above post about AVCHD H.264
What you just mentioned you're dealing with is what I talked about
exactly, but why my same 2.4ghz cpu plays 4k compressed h264 file fine with another player? also it "flies" into windows via bootcamp.See my above post about AVCHD H.264
What you just mentioned you're dealing with is what I talked about
That could be the player. Can't say for sure, but it sounds like it, especially if you can play it fine elsewhere on the same system.
Hey SoyCapitan! I like the name!
...
It sounds to me like you are working with some sort of compressed codec.
You may be right. I was told it was uncompressed, but when I check the file info it is the following Photo JPEG codec(attached files) But even with the bit rate so low this 4K footage isn't playing smooth on the X5690 on the PCIE blade with QuickTime player. VLC is really bad. In CC apps it's OK if cached or prerendered.
Attachments
Oh yes, it is most definitely a lossy compression codec you are working with there. Not only is it that, it's 8-bit and is a very CPU-intensive codec at that... especially at 4K!!!!
Just as it's famous still picture equivalent is used for final output, Photo-JPEG in the video space is the same. I wouldn't recommend using it for editing at all, especially at the bitrate your file is at. Transcoding those videos to 4K ProRes will increase the file sizes a little, but will make the video files far more workable, from both a playback and editing standpoint. You'll maintain a relatively similar data-rate, but have video files that are FAR less CPU intensive. And ProRes will retain the quality far more with each generation of rendering.
Try it out. Hopefully this helps with your tests and decisions.
Thanks. I'll let them know tomorrow that they have been using an irksome codec.
PowerMike G5 are you able to run windows-bootcamp with Samsung sm 951? and which adapter you using for it?
Ok the studio realised that using motion jpeg might not be the best option unless they want to pull still images from a video stream.
I also did some render tests in Adobe Media Encoder. OpenCL is just a tiny bit faster in some tests than CUDA using the GTX980.
The six core nMP w/D500 was about a third faster at OpenCL rendering than a dual X5690 w/GTX 980.
I don't have Windows/bootcamp on my machine at the moment. I am using the Lycom DT-120.
Yeah, I noticed Adobe Media Encoder doesn't seem to utilize all the 12-cores like how Premiere Pro does on my machine. I guess Adobe hasn't optimized it the same way.
Hello. Software developer and former IT consultant here.
I would STRONGLY suggest you keep your Mac pro, for three reasons.
First, single core performance of Nehalem is still plenty good enough for things like GUIs, the Mach Kernel, or feeding a GPU. The "2.5x single core performance" thing is a myth. It might be true if you are doing AES encryption or using AVX2.0 over SSE4.1, but as the machine is being used for video editing/encoding (mostly GPU driven these days) and not serving up encrypted data you're looking at something between 1.5x to 2.0x single core performance for most types of computations. On top of this, video encoding/decoding algorithms are highly highly highly parallel when you NEED them to be.
Second. If they aren't highly paraellized on the CPU, that usually means that the CPU isn't being used at all, your GPU is. For example, Nvidia's 980 has a HVEC encoder on it, and some of the Radeons have OpenCL encoders for h264, and HVEC is also available. Point is, in 3 or so years, you're going to want to upgrade your GPU, you won't be able to do that on an iMac, but I honestly believe that a dual x5690 system will server you well until PCIE Gen2.0 support is discontinued.
Third. Your Mac Pro has workstation class hardware. ECC memory being the main thing. Skylake is pretty stable, but they don't make ECC for no reason. As of 2016 regular DDR4 does not grantee computational accuracy or system stability the way ECC does. Being a video editor you should accept no less than 32GB memory either. Dedicating loads of memory as a read/write buffer over your SSD is possible in OSX just as it is in FreeBSD.
One more thing....
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Mac-Pro-Memory
DDR3 prices are currently at an all time low. Just think about what you could do with a 100gb ram drive or scratch? Nothing stopping you form using Gen2 4x PCIE m.2 SSD RAID cards either.
One last thing, really mean it this time...
In 2016 you are going to want a Pascal and/or Polaris card. On your Mac Pro (given you get the right model) you can have TWO of them, and yes there are codecs that will scale up to multiple cards, on an iMac you're probably going to be stuck with the Intel QuickSync HVEC encoder.
Anyway, I'm just currently building a x5650 based PC and in thinking "why not get a Mac case/board instead of SuperMicro?" I came across this thread. You know you can pick up CPU trays packed with RAM and dual x5690 CPUs on them for 400-500 bucks on eBay? I honestly don't know how you're gong to get 4,000$ for it when I could build one fully loaded out with dual 390x cards and everything else here for about 2,000$ (or 1,000$ using a single R9 380x) off eBay. I like AMD, and Apple is commited to them, wanted hardware HVEC encoding you'd need to get a 960 or 980 however, both options beat using the QuickSync on an iGPU though.
I would STRONGLY suggest you keep your Mac pro, for three reasons.
First, single core performance of Nehalem is still plenty good enough for things like GUIs, the Mach Kernel, or feeding a GPU. The "2.5x single core performance" thing is a myth. It might be true if you are doing AES encryption or using AVX2.0 over SSE4.1, but as the machine is being used for video editing/encoding (mostly GPU driven these days) and not serving up encrypted data you're looking at something between 1.5x to 2.0x single core performance for most types of computations. On top of this, video encoding/decoding algorithms are highly highly highly parallel when you NEED them to be.
Second. If they aren't highly paraellized on the CPU, that usually means that the CPU isn't being used at all, your GPU is. For example, Nvidia's 980 has a HVEC encoder on it, and some of the Radeons have OpenCL encoders for h264, and HVEC is also available. Point is, in 3 or so years, you're going to want to upgrade your GPU, you won't be able to do that on an iMac, but I honestly believe that a dual x5690 system will server you well until PCIE Gen2.0 support is discontinued.
Third. Your Mac Pro has workstation class hardware. ECC memory being the main thing. Skylake is pretty stable, but they don't make ECC for no reason. As of 2016 regular DDR4 does not grantee computational accuracy or system stability the way ECC does. Being a video editor you should accept no less than 32GB memory either. Dedicating loads of memory as a read/write buffer over your SSD is possible in OSX just as it is in FreeBSD.
One more thing....
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Mac-Pro-Memory
DDR3 prices are currently at an all time low. Just think about what you could do with a 100gb ram drive or scratch? Nothing stopping you form using Gen2 4x PCIE m.2 SSD RAID cards either.
One last thing, really mean it this time...
In 2016 you are going to want a Pascal and/or Polaris card. On your Mac Pro (given you get the right model) you can have TWO of them, and yes there are codecs that will scale up to multiple cards, on an iMac you're probably going to be stuck with the Intel QuickSync HVEC encoder.
Anyway, I'm just currently building a x5650 based PC and in thinking "why not get a Mac case/board instead of SuperMicro?" I came across this thread. You know you can pick up CPU trays packed with RAM and dual x5690 CPUs on them for 400-500 bucks on eBay? I honestly don't know how you're gong to get 4,000$ for it when I could build one fully loaded out with dual 390x cards and everything else here for about 2,000$ (or 1,000$ using a single R9 380x) off eBay. I like AMD, and Apple is commited to them, wanted hardware HVEC encoding you'd need to get a 960 or 980 however, both options beat using the QuickSync on an iGPU though.
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Thanks. I've already made a decision and the choice was Mac Pro
Right choice all the way!
I think this is not really a CPU Thing, You would need this card for getting rid the choppy Playback.
http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/compresshd/
@Mr. SoyCaptain: whats your opinion about this card? Would that help him with Playback as well?
