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4K Video Editing: nMP or upgrade my current 4.1 MP (8-Core 2.93G, 12GB RAM, ATI 4870)

H

hubiedubie

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 12, 2009
31
0
I am about to purchase a Panasonic GH4 and want to be able to edit 4k in FCPX. It seems I have 2 options:

1. Upgrade my current Mac Pro: 4.1 MP (8-Core 2.93G, 12GB RAM, ATI 4870)
Upgrade:
- 32 GB Ram
- Sapphire Radeon 7950
- OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI-E SSD: 480GB
- 4K monitor + existing Dell 24 inch


2. Purchase a nMP:
- 6 Core
- 32 GB Ram
- 512GB SSD
- 2 X ATI D700
- 4K Monitor

Obviously option 2 would be much more expensive (€5000 vs €2200 approx.), but would it be worth it?

Also if I went with option 1 would I need to by another video card to drive both 4k monitor and Dell 24 inch DVI monitor?
Thanks in advance for your help.
 
I have a Mac Pro from 2008, quad 2.6 I believe. I did a huge upgrade last year, 2GB of VRam, full ram and so on. It is not worth it. I can edit SD video just fine but I have no video acceleration. I believe it won't run 4K video. It is actually very slow compared to a 2011 iMac or 2014 Mac Mini. It is actually equivalent to the current Mac Mini in speed and I know because I have all those computers side by side at the studio doing rendering.

My bet would be to but the real thing, you will need the speed and specially the bus. Consider if you really are going to make money out of it.
 
Mileage may vary!
You can find yourself chasing HW and all the time it was the SW/HW combination.
1. Edius http://www-en.ediusworld.com/edification/edius-7-and-dslrs/edius-7-and-the-canon-eos-1d-c
Even though it's on a PC this 4K is being played with only 6GB of ram and no Raid or SSD mentioned. Edius uses the ram
2. Premiere Pro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foLxsL5RU6k
You select between the use of CUDA cores on Nvidia cards or ram.

These are just two examples showing it is possible to edit 4K on "older" computers. I used the demo of PP5 and saw 1st hand the power of their Mercury engine.

You may want to read this https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1746263/ It goes off the tracks here and there but 4K info you may find interesting.

Also compare the speed of Accelsior with the SSD of the nMP. If you need more speed (multicam 4K), what is the solution and price for option 1 and 2.
Search for the post where someone questioned the video cards in the nMP being optimized for FCPX because they did not see the gain in performance.
 
rei101 said:
I have a Mac Pro from 2008, quad 2.6 I believe. I did a huge upgrade last year, 2GB of VRam, full ram and so on. It is not worth it. I can edit SD video just fine but I have no video acceleration. I believe it won't run 4K video. It is actually very slow compared to a 2011 iMac or 2014 Mac Mini. It is actually equivalent to the current Mac Mini in speed and I know because I have all those computers side by side at the studio doing rendering.

My bet would be to but the real thing, you will need the speed and specially the bus. Consider if you really are going to make money out of it.
Click to expand...

A 2008 is a completely different ball of wax than a 2009-12.

In the Uningine Valley Benchmark, my 2008 running Dual Quad 3.2s maxes out at 35fps with anything faster than a 7950. GTX780, Titan, Titan Black, it makes no difference. 35fps.

Place the same cards and start drive in the 2009 and you can again see differences in the scores. GTX780 does 45fps while Titan Black will break 50.

The 2008 is limited in many ways that a 2009 is not. As shown by Barefeats, it is possible to upgrade a 2009 to be FASTER than any nMP you can buy at The Apple Store. It is the very inability to upgrade that holds the nMP back in those tests.
 
MacVidCards said:
As shown by Barefeats, it is possible to upgrade a 2009 to be FASTER than any nMP you can buy at The Apple Store. It is the very inability to upgrade that holds the nMP back in those tests.
Click to expand...

Thanks that's really interesting, and promising. Must check these results out.
 
Also I would wait to play with footage from the GH4 if you are editing the internal 4k, initial reports say it is very lightweight and doesn't tax the system as much.
 
You can do nearly all of your FCPX editing using proxies so your 'old' machine would probably be just fine.
 
If you are a dedicated FCX user, upgrade your CPUs and GPUs, and go the equivalent of the dual Firepro GPUs, as that NLE will be benefit from that set-up more than the other software packages.

As for the CPU upgrade, I suspect a lot of servers running 1366 socket Xeons (i.e. what you want) will be coming off 3 year leases this year, you might see prices coming down.

You don't need to go the OWC on the boot drives, there are other options to do PCIe boot drives, and apparently adapters coming to take the flash memory as well, so prices on that stuff should be coming down as well
 
I have that exact model Mac Pro (an amazing machine BTW).

You can see my signature, however the 2009 Mac Pro is THE BEST Mac Pro released IMHO.

- Stick 64GB RAM in it

- Buy a Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro PCIe Card and stick a couple of Sata III SSDs on it, like Samsung Evo's. Two 1TB drives will cost you about the same as an accelsior (I tried the acceslior, by the way).

- Put a faster GPU in it, either non EFI nVidia 700 series, or buy one from MacVidCards that has been flashed. You can get a 6GB 780 that requires no extra power.

I don't even think there's much need to upgrade the CPU in this machine. It's plenty beefy for most tasks!
 
just sharing a bit of my own experience

I have a 2009 Mac Pro, octo 2.26 ghz 20gig of RAM, 120GT, SSD for storage

It was actually slower than my 2011 iMac, 2.66ghz i5

A while later I upgraded the Mac Pro to a Octo 3.33 processor and GTX670 and it was only slightly faster than the iMac. For the cost it was not worth it.
 
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