Subject: Using Adobe Premiere Pro and FCPX to playback 8K footage. A brief summary.
With all the hype surrounding the new MP7,1 using/processing 8K footage I was very keen for seeing for myself how this type of footage would playback on the MP7,1. My son who's the Film making and Editor used some 8K footage to see how well the 'new machine' performed compared to the office MP6,1 and iMac Pro.
Let me say up front - I'm not a film editor, whereas my son is and runs a successful business - https://www.duncansharpfilms.com. Go and view his Sundance Channel, as for me its absolutely awesome playing it back on my 65" LG OLED TV with its LG Sound Bar at a reasonably high level volume setting - it's simply inspiring for me. 👍
My background is more in the engineering/scientific fields and I use the Mac for Fluid Dynamics simulations. So forgive me if my use of terms is inaccurate. I just want to express what I observed as my son put the new MP7,1 through its paces doing some 8K work.
This 8K footage could not be handled by the office MP6,1 and the iMac Pro struggled with it, especially when playback was underway with Encoding being done in the background making the iMac Pro unusable for anything else while this workflow persisted. If 'bluring' was applied for the playback things got really bad.
So using this same 8K footage the MP7,1 was now tested to see how well it would handle the above type of activities.
Here's a quick overview of the MP7,1 hardware and software.
16-core
Internal Apple 1TB SSD
384 GB RAM
J2i with 2x HDD; 8TB and 16TB
Sonnet/Samsung PCIe card with 4x 1TB blades setup as RAID-0
Radeon Vega Pro II
Afterburner
Displays: TB1 Apple 27" and 65" LG OLED 4K TV
Software: Adobe Premiere Pro 2020, CC, Media Encoder, After Effects, Blackmagic RAW, FCP X with various Plugins, Compressor, Davinci Resolve, ....
All the 8K project data/footage was loaded onto the Sonnet/Samsung device that amounted to some 1.4 TB
First, the Adobe software was used on the MP7,1.
The Adobe software could process the raw 8K footage immediately and at full resolution the playback was almost perfect but son said it was not completely smooth and at times would stutter ever so lightly that he found a bit annoying. To address this he lower the resolution some (not by much mind you) and the 8K playback was decent. He was a bit disappointed the MP7,1 couldn't playback smoothly at full resolution, but said it was acceptable. Doing this same work on the iMac Pro (10-core, 128GB RAM) was almost impossible and if doing the same with background encoding being done, the iMac Pro was unusable for anything else until the background encoding finished, and even then the iMac Pro struggled with the raw 8K footage. On the MP7,1 running encoding as well as playback of the 8K footage things were much better with the playback stuttering some and not as smooth when encoding was not in process. The background encoding activity was extremely CPU intensive and pushed all 16 cores to their limits.
Second, the FCPX software was used on the MP7,1
The first issue here was that FCPX could not or would not recognize the 8K footage (the files were grayed out and could not be selected). After a bit of head scratching, son figured he needed maybe Compressor and another FCPX plugin (don't recall what this was as son researched via Google how to deal with this issue). Anyways, we now had FCPX recognizing the 8K footage and started using it to playback the 8K footage. As best son could see, the playback performance was similar to the Adobe playback, but son was unable to figure out if FCPX was playing back at full 8K resolution or not (son is expert with Adobe but not as much using FCPX).
So this was a quick checkout of our MP7,1 using Adobe and FCPX for processing 8K footage, and I have to say the performance of both appeared to me to be similar. The important aspect is the this MP7,1 is far more capable than the iMac Pro and certainly more so compared to the MP6,1.
Of course more testing will be done over the next week or so.
The bottom line is...
For me using Fluid Dynamics simulation code the MP7,1 is ideal.
For my son using his editing tools he's convinced he can handle client's demands much better and will be in a better position for taking on more intensive client projects with the addition of having the MP7,1 on hand. He was impressed with the MP7,1 capability as well as its performance especially handling multiple simultaneous editing activities.
Of course, any comments on the above is most welcomed.
With all the hype surrounding the new MP7,1 using/processing 8K footage I was very keen for seeing for myself how this type of footage would playback on the MP7,1. My son who's the Film making and Editor used some 8K footage to see how well the 'new machine' performed compared to the office MP6,1 and iMac Pro.
Let me say up front - I'm not a film editor, whereas my son is and runs a successful business - https://www.duncansharpfilms.com. Go and view his Sundance Channel, as for me its absolutely awesome playing it back on my 65" LG OLED TV with its LG Sound Bar at a reasonably high level volume setting - it's simply inspiring for me. 👍
My background is more in the engineering/scientific fields and I use the Mac for Fluid Dynamics simulations. So forgive me if my use of terms is inaccurate. I just want to express what I observed as my son put the new MP7,1 through its paces doing some 8K work.
This 8K footage could not be handled by the office MP6,1 and the iMac Pro struggled with it, especially when playback was underway with Encoding being done in the background making the iMac Pro unusable for anything else while this workflow persisted. If 'bluring' was applied for the playback things got really bad.
So using this same 8K footage the MP7,1 was now tested to see how well it would handle the above type of activities.
Here's a quick overview of the MP7,1 hardware and software.
16-core
Internal Apple 1TB SSD
384 GB RAM
J2i with 2x HDD; 8TB and 16TB
Sonnet/Samsung PCIe card with 4x 1TB blades setup as RAID-0
Radeon Vega Pro II
Afterburner
Displays: TB1 Apple 27" and 65" LG OLED 4K TV
Software: Adobe Premiere Pro 2020, CC, Media Encoder, After Effects, Blackmagic RAW, FCP X with various Plugins, Compressor, Davinci Resolve, ....
All the 8K project data/footage was loaded onto the Sonnet/Samsung device that amounted to some 1.4 TB
First, the Adobe software was used on the MP7,1.
The Adobe software could process the raw 8K footage immediately and at full resolution the playback was almost perfect but son said it was not completely smooth and at times would stutter ever so lightly that he found a bit annoying. To address this he lower the resolution some (not by much mind you) and the 8K playback was decent. He was a bit disappointed the MP7,1 couldn't playback smoothly at full resolution, but said it was acceptable. Doing this same work on the iMac Pro (10-core, 128GB RAM) was almost impossible and if doing the same with background encoding being done, the iMac Pro was unusable for anything else until the background encoding finished, and even then the iMac Pro struggled with the raw 8K footage. On the MP7,1 running encoding as well as playback of the 8K footage things were much better with the playback stuttering some and not as smooth when encoding was not in process. The background encoding activity was extremely CPU intensive and pushed all 16 cores to their limits.
Second, the FCPX software was used on the MP7,1
The first issue here was that FCPX could not or would not recognize the 8K footage (the files were grayed out and could not be selected). After a bit of head scratching, son figured he needed maybe Compressor and another FCPX plugin (don't recall what this was as son researched via Google how to deal with this issue). Anyways, we now had FCPX recognizing the 8K footage and started using it to playback the 8K footage. As best son could see, the playback performance was similar to the Adobe playback, but son was unable to figure out if FCPX was playing back at full 8K resolution or not (son is expert with Adobe but not as much using FCPX).
So this was a quick checkout of our MP7,1 using Adobe and FCPX for processing 8K footage, and I have to say the performance of both appeared to me to be similar. The important aspect is the this MP7,1 is far more capable than the iMac Pro and certainly more so compared to the MP6,1.
Of course more testing will be done over the next week or so.
The bottom line is...
For me using Fluid Dynamics simulation code the MP7,1 is ideal.
For my son using his editing tools he's convinced he can handle client's demands much better and will be in a better position for taking on more intensive client projects with the addition of having the MP7,1 on hand. He was impressed with the MP7,1 capability as well as its performance especially handling multiple simultaneous editing activities.
Of course, any comments on the above is most welcomed.
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