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Can I edit 4K video with this MacBook Pro?
- Thread starter martieda
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I have a similar machine except mine has the M370X GPU. In GeekBench 4.x, the difference in GPU performance is 37380 vs 29022, so it's a usable but not gigantic difference. A lot of video editing is not GPU-limited but CPU-limited, although many effects are GPU enabled.
I edit H264 1080p and 4k video on my MBP and it does OK, but anytime you deal with 4k you normally will need to use proxy for best performance -- even with FCPX. Premiere is somewhat slower on the same hardware, so in that case you definitely must use proxy. Fortunately Adobe added this as a built-in feature in recent versions.
For external storage, just don't use a slow, bus-powered USB 3.0 spinning drive -- especially for 4k and certainly not for transcoded ProRes material. A Thunderbolt SSD drive would be ideal but they are more expensive. The USB 3.1 1TB Samsung T3 is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AVF6UO8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_dp_CiIpybGJHW327
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From mactracker.app :
AMD Radeon R9 M370X and Intel Iris Pro 5200 (2.5 and 2.8 GHz)
Vram 2GB M370x, 1.5GB shared Iris Pro.
So, yes it has both a discrete and an integrated GPU with enough capacity for 4k video editing on both.
AMD Radeon R9 M370X and Intel Iris Pro 5200 (2.5 and 2.8 GHz)
Vram 2GB M370x, 1.5GB shared Iris Pro.
So, yes it has both a discrete and an integrated GPU with enough capacity for 4k video editing on both.
There is also a non dGPU 2.5 GHz model: http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-iris-only-mid-2015-retina-display-specs.html
That is a custom order when you upgrade the processor only on the base model, and highly unlikely to be in circulation this soon after it was on sale.
However, as noted above, the Iris Pro 5200 has 1.5GB vram shared from the system ram of 16GB.
This is far and away enough for editing 4k video files on an external 4k monitor.
(The only significant point of difference as far as video goes for the iGPU only models vs the dGPU models is that the dGPU can drive a 5k display, which is unlikely to matter as the LG 5k is TB3 connected and is made for the 2016 MBP.)
Since it is a 2015 MBP, it has been around for more than a year, and maybe someone did buy it like this in the past year and then sold it recently.
But this is just Kleinkrämerei and not relevant to editing 4K, especially with proxies, which allow me to play back a multicam clip with 32 angles and 16 in view on a lousy 13" 2015 rMBP with media only stored on one external HDD. Fantastic little beasts.
So after 6 months of trying this machine out what are the conclusions? I'm about to purchase a MBP 2015 15'' and I want to edit 4K video...
It can be done.
I'm using a quad 2.2Ghz MBP2015 and it can edit 4K 30FPS smoothly without stutter. Impressive. Better than I expected.
Yeh I know I finally went for it back in July. Sometimes just spending almost 2K answers the question doesn't it ?! It's a beast indeed
Actually, it's not an easy answer. I've a Mac Pro quad 3.7Ghz and Final Cut renders slower compared to the Macbook Pro quad 2.2Ghz. Not sure why that is so but I'm really unhappy with the Mac Pro.
The CPU in the MBP has Intel QuickSync which is a dedicated bit of hardware for encoding h.264 files (single pass only). The Mac Pro cylinders' Xeon chips don't have Quick Sync so all the encoding is done by the CPU, which is significantly slower at the job. Move up to two pass encoding and the Mac Pro will win the race, but most people stick to single pass because it's quicker.
https://larryjordan.com/articles/mac-pro-video-compression/
The information in that article is dated and no longer correct. The 2015 i7 iMac 27 encodes to single-pass H264 about 1.9x faster than a 12-core D700 Mac Pro. FCPX 10.3.4 in two-pass "Better Quality" mode is about 1.8x slower than single-pass, so even the 2015 iMac in two-pass mode was faster than the 12-core nMP.
The 2017 iMac 27 is about 2x faster than the 2015 model at H264 encode/decode, apparently due to Kaby Lake Quick Sync improvements. In rough terms it is nearly 4x faster than the 12-core nMP on this workload in single-pass mode, and roughly 2x faster in two-pass mode.
It is also much faster on the H264 *decode* side, not just encoding. A very common workflow is transcoding H264 to ProRes proxy, which is mainly a decode task since ProRes encoding is less CPU intensive than H264. In this case there is no single pass vs two-pass decision: the algorithm is the same.
On H264 to ProRes proxy transcoding, I recently tested a 12-core D700 Mac Pro vs a 2017 i7 iMac 27 using FCPX and the iMac was consistently about 3.5x faster on this task.