iMac Pro Well-Balanced, Professional Insight on the iMac Pro

[Bryan Bowler]

I really enjoyed reading this highly polished review that hit the streets a few days ago. It offers some real insight and perspectives from working pros in the cinema industry.

https://www.dday.it/redazione/26144/apple-imac-pro-review

I recently received my iMac Pro and am in the final stages of setting it up. I have two 8-day trips coming up, so it will be 3-4 weeks before I can start putting it through the paces, but I'm looking forward to seeing that this beauty can do!

 

[joema2]

I really enjoyed reading this highly polished review that hit the streets a few days ago. It offers some real insight and perspectives from working pros in the cinema industry. ...

I'm editing a large documentary (about 230 hr of 4k H264 source material, comprising about 7,500 clips and 20TB) on a 10-core Vega64 iMac Pro using FCPX. It's pretty nice and fairly quiet. Transcoding for 24 hr usually doesn't cause the fans to spin up audibly as on a regular iMac.

The main downside is it (or FCPX on this hardware) is not sufficiently optimized for H264. It is much faster than a 12-core D700 Mac Pro, but those were an absolute dog on H264.

It is faster than a top 2017 iMac when encoding to 1080p H264 but it's slower at several related tasks: importing 4k H264 and generating proxies, exporting to 4k H264, and timeline scrubbing response is no quicker than the iMac on this material. This is likely due hardware or software inefficiencies in how FCPX uses AMD's UVD/VCE transcoding hardware. Xeon doesn't have Quick Sync so the only option for hardware acceleration is using AMD.

Filmmakers in the scripted narrative world usually acquire in ProRes or RAW and the iMac Pro is very fast at that. However in the documentary and event world, we often cannot use those acquisition codecs due to the high shooting ratios involved.