Buying new Mac Pro.......

[Ifti]

Im looking to buy a new Mac Pro, which will primarily be used for video editing - probably with Premier or Final Cut Pro etc. Im looking at this one:

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro

Only thought I have is with the graphics. I thought most rendering and conversion etc is done with the CPU power, which is why I have gone for an 8 core.
Will the included 1GB graphics be enough for some serious video editing, or should I be looking at more?

To my understanding it should be more then enough?

Thanks

 

[The-Pro]

Should be more than enough.

However, a lot of other people will probably point this out aswell. It is very likely the Mac Pro will get refreshed soon. So if you can wait, then wait for a couple months and get a new one.
Also if you want to save some money, look at the refurbished Mac Pros here: http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals/mac at the bottom of the page. They dont have any 8-core models at the moment but the offers change daily.

 

[Macman45]

I was looking into this myself....I'd say wait if you can, we are due a refresh shortly and you don't want to be out of date a month or so after you buy your newbie.

 

[24Frames]

Im looking to buy a new Mac Pro, which will primarily be used for video editing - probably with Premier or Final Cut Pro etc. Im looking at this one:

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro

Only thought I have is with the graphics. I thought most rendering and conversion etc is done with the CPU power, which is why I have gone for an 8 core.
Will the included 1GB graphics be enough for some serious video editing, or should I be looking at more?

To my understanding it should be more then enough?

Thanks

Adobe Premiere Pro users GPU acceleration, so the GPU matters. I would check this out carefully, it could make a big difference. Not sure about Final Cut X.

But I would wait a week or two. The Mac Pros will be updated very soon. Everything is now in place for an update, the E5 Xeons from intel, 79xx Graphics from AMD and GeForce GTX-680 from nvidia.

If you think about it Apple could not have released MPs at the same time as the iPad for logistics reasons, they simply couldn't ship them, think how many iPads fit in a MP box. The iPad international rollout takes place today, with that out the way Apple would be able to update the Mac Pro in the next few weeks. HP and Dell are not shipping E5s yet, so release date could be in April.

If you really can't wait then buy a 27 iMac with the i7 option, install 2 x 8GB RAM from Crucial (or other top vendor) add a TB HD and you will be good to go. 27 iMac could be used as a display for a Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. Resale value on iMacs is very good, just look on eBay.

The key problem with using iMacs and MacBook Pros for rendering video or CG is that they are based on laptop chips which are not designed to be used at high performance running flat out for hour upon hour of Video / CG rendering, but rather for short bursts.

 

[24Frames]

Have a look at the second tweet (retweet) here https://twitter.com/#!/Penboa for one video editors take on iMac versus current generation Mac Pro for video editing.

 

[derbothaus]

So it works for him. Good job. It is a fast computer. Personally I hate "all-in-ones".

 

[CaptainChunk]

Premiere Pro and FCP X handle GPGPU processing similarly, albeit using different methods to achieve it.


Premiere Pro requires a CUDA card with at least 896MB of VRAM to enable hardware GPU support in the Mercury Playback Engine. Adobe soft-locks cards that not on their "approved card list", but that can be defeated easily with some light hacking. This is especially important for Mac users, because Adobe only supports two CUDA cards on our platform (the discontinued GTX 285 and the pricey Quadro 4000). Lots of info on how to do this here.

One thing to understand about hardware acceleration in Premiere Pro is that it benefits the speed of effects, scaling, rendering, etc, but it does NOT speed up video encoding/decoding/transcoding. This is still handled entirely by the CPU. So, if you're cutting a highly-compressed codec like H.264/AVC "natively" in Premiere Pro, CPU still matters quite a bit.


FCP X uses OpenCL to a lot of the same things that Adobe does with their hardware mode MPE. Most modern GPUs (both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD) made within the last 3-4 (with a few exceptions) support OpenCL. FCP X will run on a wider range of official Mac GPUs because of this.

But again, don't expect a faster GPU to improve your encoding/decoding/transcoding speed one bit. Like in Premiere Pro, FCP X does this entirely in CPU.