I wouldn't buy the iMac with the 2GB VRAM options if I were you.
You may wish to go hexa over the quad. And you could buy a 12 core with the base D300s and swap with the D700 next year then sell the entry level quad MP as an entry level MP.
The problem I find with Adobe is that they aren't really predictable in that regard. It's possible they'll want more, but it's also possible that when they do finally have stable support, it will require a later version of OpenCL than what is supported on these due to some feature that is only guaranteed in a later specification. Generally when evaluating a purchase for its accommodation of future needs, I consider what I think might show up within 18 months. Things often take time to stabilize even after that. They have gotten a little drawn out lately, but I usually look at it as a three year purchase cycle, so 18 months is midway.
That comment wasn't necessary. Do it again, and you'll get deleted.
I am just curious how you (melgross) got on par with mathematica, even if it was meant to be derogatory... There must be some deep inside joke I am missing.
Looks like the 840 pro is fast enough. You can put one in into a mini. Likely though large files will come on an external drive making this point moot.
840 pro is fast, but quite expensive (and sadly, does not fit into mac books), well over half the price of the mini. I would say that once you are monkeying around with the innards of the machine, a hackintosh is a better option.
I get a lot more than you think. I just don't mind saying what I think. But why would anyone buy a multi thousand dollar workstation to play games on or to edit home movies on? It makes no sense financially, or even for editing purposes. A high end iMac is faster for most uses, and almost as fast for software like iPhoto, and other consumer level video editing apps that can't use all those cores.
If you buy the four core model, there is little advantage to it for the home. A small speed boost for per core use, but not much else. The 300 cards aren't all that fast either. The main advantage would be for those who need vast bandwidth for dual channel Ethernet, or the 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports.
A huge advantage of the Mac Pro over the iMac is the form factor -- you can actually easily throw it in the back seat of your car (or your backpack), and take it with you to work or to Aunt Phyllis' house for that show and tell (assuming she has a display you can hook up, which is quite likely these days)/ This is true of the mini (which is, however, much less powerful), but no of the iMac.
XDCAM (I think the guys were doing HD and not HD 422) played back and edited fine on a 2008 MBP using FCP7. I'd be surprised if playback were choppy in a 2012 mini. What issues have you seen and what are you using for playback?
2008 Mac Pro 2.8 Quad with 10GB RAM using an internal 7200rpm Seagate drive.
A typical file is around 10 seconds or so, output from After Effects using the Animation codec. 1080p, 8-bit x 4 (RGB+A), all keyframes (i.e. no intra-frame compression).
If I try to play it with Quick Look or QuickTime it'll play only the first 15-20 frames. The progress bar will continue to move, but the video will be "frozen" on whatever frame it played last. Sometimes it will manage to spit out another single frame somewhere around 7 or 8 seconds in (and then remain hung on that "frozen" frame), but usually it just stays hung up until the end of the file, at which point the display changes to the last frame of the video. It is, in essence, doing the opposite of what's expected. Instead of skipping a few frames while playing most of them, it's skipping most of them while playing only a few.
The workaround is to use a Proxy. I just export a 720p version using H.264, cut the sound to that, then marry the finished audio with the original video and render it out. Since the last part doesn't require real-time playback it works fine.
For video playback and basic video chopping, a dedicated GPU won't make a difference. For effects rendering, it can
For effects rendering, is the benefit of a better GPU limited to improving the number of frames per second that can be played in real time or does it actually do part of the computation that would otherwise be done by the CPU?
In other words, if I have two systems that are completely identical except for the GPU, and I tell them both to render a complicated effects sequence to disk, with the further assumption that there is no disk speed bottleneck, will the one with the more powerful GPU perform the task more quickly than the machine with the lesser GPU?
2008 Mac Pro 2.8 Quad with 10GB RAM using an internal 7200rpm Seagate drive.
A typical file is around 10 seconds or so, output from After Effects using the Animation codec. 1080p, 8-bit x 4 (RGB+A), all keyframes (i.e. no intra-frame compression).
Assuming CS6 After Effect has CUDA acceleration for rendering. If it still has the stock Radeon in it that's not doing you any favors. AE is RAM hungry but I'm assuming you have at least 8 GB.
Given what you write though you aren't generating the animation sequence. Still if you had AE on your Mac Pro you could handle playback better. Probably.
Quote:
If I try to play it with Quick Look or QuickTime it'll play only the first 15-20 frames. The progress bar will continue to move, but the video will be "frozen" on whatever frame it played last. Sometimes it will manage to spit out another single frame somewhere around 7 or 8 seconds in (and then remain hung on that "frozen" frame), but usually it just stays hung up until the end of the file, at which point the display changes to the last frame of the video. It is, in essence, doing the opposite of what's expected. Instead of skipping a few frames while playing most of them, it's skipping most of them while playing only a few.
Having only watched people do this my impression is AE uses RAM preview heavily for smooth playback. Not something that Quicktime Pro can do. The animation codec is high quality and very demanding. My guess is that the normal workflow is to export the animation into the codec being used in FCP (or PP) for edits for smooth editing.
I would ask for this file vs (or in addition to) the animation codec.
Quote:
The workaround is to use a Proxy. I just export a 720p version using H.264, cut the sound to that, then marry the finished audio with the original video and render it out. Since the last part doesn't require real-time playback it works fine
Well that's probably the right thing to do. The best thing to do is ask on creative cow (and not here) whether the Mac Mini will work for you using the exact tool chain and workflow you use.
I am just curious how you (melgross) got on par with mathematica, even if it was meant to be derogatory... There must be some deep inside joke I am missing.
It was not derogatory. The mathematica reference was due to some of my own nerdy math references. They have nothing to do with him (just clearing that up and hopefully my mentioning that doesn't result in post disappearance).
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
Assuming CS6 After Effect has CUDA acceleration for rendering. If it still has the stock Radeon in it that's not doing you any favors. AE is RAM hungry but I'm assuming you have at least 8 GB.
Given what you write though you aren't generating the animation sequence. Still if you had AE on your Mac Pro you could handle playback better. Probably.
Part of the reason it showed up that way was due to NVidia doing a portion of the work. They had some experience with raytracing on CUDA. For example they own the remnants of Mental Images and that IP, which resulted in iray. They had some experience from gelato, and they do offer a number of things in the way of libraries.
Quote:
Well that's probably the right thing to do. The best thing to do is ask on creative cow (and not here) whether the Mac Mini will work for you using the exact tool chain and workflow you use.
That is a good idea, but the recent "which mac should I buy" threads seem to be light on responses. I just checked.
The $2749 27" <span style="line-height:1.4em;">iMac is indeed $2749. If you add FCPX then it's more but that's immaterial if you aren't going to use FCPX. The POINT is that iMovie and FCPX are now very similar under the hood. The comment that "consumer grade video software" won't use all the cores is likely no longer true for iMovie 13. </span>
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">If you want to add $500 to the price of the Mac Pro for the monitor keyboard and mouse that would be fair. That makes the monetary equation:</span>
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">$2749 for the iMac vs $3599 for the Mac Pro. Higher but you get to pick which monitor you want.</span>
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">None of the choices are $3900. I have no idea why you cannot add. </span>
My addition is perfect. You are trying to make it look cheaper than it really is by pretending the monitor is seperate, as though you can use the Mac Pro without one, but that you can add one if you want to.
I simply used your own choice for a monitor for the price. That's another $700. I could have added the Sharp that Apple sells for this at $3,500, but I didn't.
So add the monitor, and the price goes up by that amount, I'm sure you know this. The iMac obviously doesn't need a monitor, so that price remains the same. Why would you by a Mac Pro and not go 4k? Seems a waste of graphics abilities. It's disingenuous to act as though the purchase price of a new Mac Pro wouldn't include a new decent quality monitor. The Dell will be decent! but not by any means pro grade. That will cost one much more.
So let's try to be fair, ok? Include everything you need for a new installation.
I am just curious how you (melgross) got on par with mathematica, even if it was meant to be derogatory... There must be some deep inside joke I am missing.
Since the comment really was "melgross or Mathematica", I think the dig was obvious. At least I apologized for my somewhat over the top response earlier, I think responding the way I did to that comment was appropriate.
At any rate, people need to learn to be smart around mods. I'm pretty good in allowing comments, as are some others here. But some web sites will ban you for even questioning what a mod said. But do t take advantage of it here.
Since the comment really was "melgross or Mathematica", I think the dig was obvious. At least I apologized for my somewhat over the top response earlier, I think responding the way I did to that comment was appropriate.
At any rate, people need to learn to be smart around mods. I'm pretty good in allowing comments, as are some others here. But some web sites will ban you for even questioning what a mod said. But do t take advantage of it here.
The dig eludes me completely. Mathematica is one program that CAN use the Mac Pro, since it can use the GPUs for computation. It can also (for most things I do with it) can use all the parallelism you can throw at it, and it can CERTAINLY use all the cache.
My addition is perfect. You are trying to make it look cheaper than it really is by pretending the monitor is seperate, as though you can use the Mac Pro without one, but that you can add one if you want to.
I simply used your own choice for a monitor for the price. That's another $700. I could have added the Sharp that Apple sells for this at $3,500, but I didn't.
So add the monitor, and the price goes up by that amount, I'm sure you know this. The iMac obviously doesn't need a monitor, so that price remains the same. Why would you by a Mac Pro and not go 4k? Seems a waste of graphics abilities. It's disingenuous to act as though the purchase price of a new Mac Pro wouldn't include a new decent quality monitor. The Dell will be decent! but not by any means pro grade. That will cost one much more.
So let's try to be fair, ok? Include everything you need for a new installation.
If I got a Mac Pro I probably wouldn't go 4K with it. No reason to at the moment. Nor could the iMac do so anyway.
I don't have a problem with adding $720 for a brand new installation for a decent 27" display, keyboard and mouse. That's a 27" U2713HM 2560x1440 IPS monitor for $580 + $140 for keyboard and mouse. And yes, this is pro grade. Or at least as pro grade as the iMac display.
However you STILL don't get to $3,900 even if you charged $700. I dunno what you are adding to get to $3900. Nor can you add FCP to the price without adding it to both sides.
Frankly the Mac Pro arguably represents a far better value than the top end iMac for the home purchaser. Both are very expensive machines but the Mac Pro has more potential longevity.
Yeah. That was kind of a shock. In the past, it just seemed like they were looking for reasons to dock points from Apple's repairability ratings. In this case, I don't know, it seems almost generous in comparison. One can easily get inside and swap parts, but many of the parts have no alternative source, at least not yet.
2008 Mac Pro 2.8 Quad with 10GB RAM using an internal 7200rpm Seagate drive.
A typical file is around 10 seconds or so, output from After Effects using the Animation codec. 1080p, 8-bit x 4 (RGB+A), all keyframes (i.e. no intra-frame compression).
If I try to play it with Quick Look or QuickTime it'll play only the first 15-20 frames.
If you run the Blackmagic speed test, what is the rating you get for the 7200 rpm drive?
Also, if you open the inspector window in Quicktime, what does it say is the bitrate for the video?
You can also try using ProRes 4444, 422, 422LT and 422Proxy at 1080p and see how they run. I think 4444 will have trouble on a 7200 rpm drive but try it anyway.
For effects rendering, is the benefit of a better GPU limited to improving the number of frames per second that can be played in real time or does it actually do part of the computation that would otherwise be done by the CPU?
In other words, if I have two systems that are completely identical except for the GPU, and I tell them both to render a complicated effects sequence to disk, with the further assumption that there is no disk speed bottleneck, will the one with the more powerful GPU perform the task more quickly than the machine with the lesser GPU?
It depends on the program but when effects can be rendered on the GPU, having a better GPU helps.
Yeah. That was kind of a shock. In the past, it just seemed like they were looking for reasons to dock points from Apple's repairability ratings. In this case, I don't know, it seems almost generous in comparison. One can easily get inside and swap parts, but many of the parts have no alternative source, at least not yet.
I can ask them but I think it's based solely on the replaceability (not so much upgradability) of core components, which does mean the Mac Pro is good from Even desktop PC standards.
The dig eludes me completely. Mathematica is one program that CAN use the Mac Pro, since it can use the GPUs for computation. It can also (for most things I do with it) can use all the parallelism you can throw at it, and it can CERTAINLY use all the cache.
Ok, let's drop it, shall we? If you didn't understand the dig, that's fine. I did.
If I got a Mac Pro I probably wouldn't go 4K with it. No reason to at the moment. Nor could the iMac do so anyway.
I don't have a problem with adding $720 for a brand new installation for a decent 27" display, keyboard and mouse. That's a 27" U2713HM <span style="line-height:1.4em;">2560x1440 IPS monitor for $580 + $14</span>
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">0 for keyboard and mouse. And yes, this is pro grade. Or at least as pro grade as the iMac display.</span>
However you STILL don't get to $3,900 even if you charged $700. I dunno what you are adding to get to $3900. Nor can you add FCP to the price without adding it to both sides.
Frankly the Mac Pro arguably represents a far better value than the top end iMac for the home purchaser. Both are very expensive machines but the Mac Pro has more potential longevity.
I don't understand how you don't come to $3900, which would be a rounded off number, of course.
You use $3099 as your base.
Then we add the $699 for the monitor you selected.
Then a keyboard and mouse is about $100, depending on whether you're buying wireless models or not.
That adds to $3900. Where's the problem? It's what I said in the first post.
But now, you're changing the game here. Stick to your first selection for a monitor. And if you're going to buy a Mac Pro, buy a real keyboard and mouse, not some cheap junk. One for FCP specifically, is over $100 by itself, and some are more, depending on how high a quality model you really need. Apple's is considered to be very good, and I agree with that.
Comments
I wouldn't buy the iMac with the 2GB VRAM options if I were you.
You may wish to go hexa over the quad. And you could buy a 12 core with the base D300s and swap with the D700 next year then sell the entry level quad MP as an entry level MP.
The problem I find with Adobe is that they aren't really predictable in that regard. It's possible they'll want more, but it's also possible that when they do finally have stable support, it will require a later version of OpenCL than what is supported on these due to some feature that is only guaranteed in a later specification. Generally when evaluating a purchase for its accommodation of future needs, I consider what I think might show up within 18 months. Things often take time to stabilize even after that. They have gotten a little drawn out lately, but I usually look at it as a three year purchase cycle, so 18 months is midway.
That comment wasn't necessary. Do it again, and you'll get deleted.
I am just curious how you (melgross) got on par with mathematica, even if it was meant to be derogatory... There must be some deep inside joke I am missing.
Looks like the 840 pro is fast enough. You can put one in into a mini. Likely though large files will come on an external drive making this point moot.
840 pro is fast, but quite expensive (and sadly, does not fit into mac books), well over half the price of the mini. I would say that once you are monkeying around with the innards of the machine, a hackintosh is a better option.
I get a lot more than you think. I just don't mind saying what I think. But why would anyone buy a multi thousand dollar workstation to play games on or to edit home movies on? It makes no sense financially, or even for editing purposes. A high end iMac is faster for most uses, and almost as fast for software like iPhoto, and other consumer level video editing apps that can't use all those cores.
If you buy the four core model, there is little advantage to it for the home. A small speed boost for per core use, but not much else. The 300 cards aren't all that fast either. The main advantage would be for those who need vast bandwidth for dual channel Ethernet, or the 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports.
A huge advantage of the Mac Pro over the iMac is the form factor -- you can actually easily throw it in the back seat of your car (or your backpack), and take it with you to work or to Aunt Phyllis' house for that show and tell (assuming she has a display you can hook up, which is quite likely these days)/ This is true of the mini (which is, however, much less powerful), but no of the iMac.
XDCAM (I think the guys were doing HD and not HD 422) played back and edited fine on a 2008 MBP using FCP7. I'd be surprised if playback were choppy in a 2012 mini. What issues have you seen and what are you using for playback?
2008 Mac Pro 2.8 Quad with 10GB RAM using an internal 7200rpm Seagate drive.
A typical file is around 10 seconds or so, output from After Effects using the Animation codec. 1080p, 8-bit x 4 (RGB+A), all keyframes (i.e. no intra-frame compression).
If I try to play it with Quick Look or QuickTime it'll play only the first 15-20 frames. The progress bar will continue to move, but the video will be "frozen" on whatever frame it played last. Sometimes it will manage to spit out another single frame somewhere around 7 or 8 seconds in (and then remain hung on that "frozen" frame), but usually it just stays hung up until the end of the file, at which point the display changes to the last frame of the video. It is, in essence, doing the opposite of what's expected. Instead of skipping a few frames while playing most of them, it's skipping most of them while playing only a few.
The workaround is to use a Proxy. I just export a 720p version using H.264, cut the sound to that, then marry the finished audio with the original video and render it out. Since the last part doesn't require real-time playback it works fine.
For video playback and basic video chopping, a dedicated GPU won't make a difference. For effects rendering, it can
For effects rendering, is the benefit of a better GPU limited to improving the number of frames per second that can be played in real time or does it actually do part of the computation that would otherwise be done by the CPU?
In other words, if I have two systems that are completely identical except for the GPU, and I tell them both to render a complicated effects sequence to disk, with the further assumption that there is no disk speed bottleneck, will the one with the more powerful GPU perform the task more quickly than the machine with the lesser GPU?
2008 Mac Pro 2.8 Quad with 10GB RAM using an internal 7200rpm Seagate drive.
A typical file is around 10 seconds or so, output from After Effects using the Animation codec. 1080p, 8-bit x 4 (RGB+A), all keyframes (i.e. no intra-frame compression).
Assuming CS6 After Effect has CUDA acceleration for rendering. If it still has the stock Radeon in it that's not doing you any favors. AE is RAM hungry but I'm assuming you have at least 8 GB.
Given what you write though you aren't generating the animation sequence. Still if you had AE on your Mac Pro you could handle playback better. Probably.
Having only watched people do this my impression is AE uses RAM preview heavily for smooth playback. Not something that Quicktime Pro can do. The animation codec is high quality and very demanding. My guess is that the normal workflow is to export the animation into the codec being used in FCP (or PP) for edits for smooth editing.
I would ask for this file vs (or in addition to) the animation codec.
Well that's probably the right thing to do. The best thing to do is ask on creative cow (and not here) whether the Mac Mini will work for you using the exact tool chain and workflow you use.
I am just curious how you (melgross) got on par with mathematica, even if it was meant to be derogatory... There must be some deep inside joke I am missing.
It was not derogatory. The mathematica reference was due to some of my own nerdy math references. They have nothing to do with him (just clearing that up and hopefully my mentioning that doesn't result in post disappearance).
Assuming CS6 After Effect has CUDA acceleration for rendering. If it still has the stock Radeon in it that's not doing you any favors. AE is RAM hungry but I'm assuming you have at least 8 GB.
Given what you write though you aren't generating the animation sequence. Still if you had AE on your Mac Pro you could handle playback better. Probably.
Part of the reason it showed up that way was due to NVidia doing a portion of the work. They had some experience with raytracing on CUDA. For example they own the remnants of Mental Images and that IP, which resulted in iray. They had some experience from gelato, and they do offer a number of things in the way of libraries.
That is a good idea, but the recent "which mac should I buy" threads seem to be light on responses. I just checked.
My addition is perfect. You are trying to make it look cheaper than it really is by pretending the monitor is seperate, as though you can use the Mac Pro without one, but that you can add one if you want to.
I simply used your own choice for a monitor for the price. That's another $700. I could have added the Sharp that Apple sells for this at $3,500, but I didn't.
So add the monitor, and the price goes up by that amount, I'm sure you know this. The iMac obviously doesn't need a monitor, so that price remains the same. Why would you by a Mac Pro and not go 4k? Seems a waste of graphics abilities. It's disingenuous to act as though the purchase price of a new Mac Pro wouldn't include a new decent quality monitor. The Dell will be decent! but not by any means pro grade. That will cost one much more.
So let's try to be fair, ok? Include everything you need for a new installation.
Since the comment really was "melgross or Mathematica", I think the dig was obvious. At least I apologized for my somewhat over the top response earlier, I think responding the way I did to that comment was appropriate.
At any rate, people need to learn to be smart around mods. I'm pretty good in allowing comments, as are some others here. But some web sites will ban you for even questioning what a mod said. But do t take advantage of it here.
Since the comment really was "melgross or Mathematica", I think the dig was obvious. At least I apologized for my somewhat over the top response earlier, I think responding the way I did to that comment was appropriate.
At any rate, people need to learn to be smart around mods. I'm pretty good in allowing comments, as are some others here. But some web sites will ban you for even questioning what a mod said. But do t take advantage of it here.
The dig eludes me completely. Mathematica is one program that CAN use the Mac Pro, since it can use the GPUs for computation. It can also (for most things I do with it) can use all the parallelism you can throw at it, and it can CERTAINLY use all the cache.
Since the comment really was "melgross or Mathematica", I think the dig was obvious.
We don't get along but frankly I don't get it.
I wouldn't call you Mathematica on a good day as I find Mathematica useful.
My addition is perfect. You are trying to make it look cheaper than it really is by pretending the monitor is seperate, as though you can use the Mac Pro without one, but that you can add one if you want to.
I simply used your own choice for a monitor for the price. That's another $700. I could have added the Sharp that Apple sells for this at $3,500, but I didn't.
So add the monitor, and the price goes up by that amount, I'm sure you know this. The iMac obviously doesn't need a monitor, so that price remains the same. Why would you by a Mac Pro and not go 4k? Seems a waste of graphics abilities. It's disingenuous to act as though the purchase price of a new Mac Pro wouldn't include a new decent quality monitor. The Dell will be decent! but not by any means pro grade. That will cost one much more.
So let's try to be fair, ok? Include everything you need for a new installation.
If I got a Mac Pro I probably wouldn't go 4K with it. No reason to at the moment. Nor could the iMac do so anyway.
I don't have a problem with adding $720 for a brand new installation for a decent 27" display, keyboard and mouse. That's a 27" U2713HM 2560x1440 IPS monitor for $580 + $140 for keyboard and mouse. And yes, this is pro grade. Or at least as pro grade as the iMac display.
However you STILL don't get to $3,900 even if you charged $700. I dunno what you are adding to get to $3900. Nor can you add FCP to the price without adding it to both sides.
Frankly the Mac Pro arguably represents a far better value than the top end iMac for the home purchaser. Both are very expensive machines but the Mac Pro has more potential longevity.
Yeah. That was kind of a shock. In the past, it just seemed like they were looking for reasons to dock points from Apple's repairability ratings. In this case, I don't know, it seems almost generous in comparison. One can easily get inside and swap parts, but many of the parts have no alternative source, at least not yet.
If you run the Blackmagic speed test, what is the rating you get for the 7200 rpm drive?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12
Also, if you open the inspector window in Quicktime, what does it say is the bitrate for the video?
You can also try using ProRes 4444, 422, 422LT and 422Proxy at 1080p and see how they run. I think 4444 will have trouble on a 7200 rpm drive but try it anyway.
It depends on the program but when effects can be rendered on the GPU, having a better GPU helps.
I can ask them but I think it's based solely on the replaceability (not so much upgradability) of core components, which does mean the Mac Pro is good from Even desktop PC standards.
Ok, let's drop it, shall we? If you didn't understand the dig, that's fine. I did.
Well, by that comment on your part, we can see why we don't get along, don't we?
I don't understand how you don't come to $3900, which would be a rounded off number, of course.
You use $3099 as your base.
Then we add the $699 for the monitor you selected.
Then a keyboard and mouse is about $100, depending on whether you're buying wireless models or not.
That adds to $3900. Where's the problem? It's what I said in the first post.
But now, you're changing the game here. Stick to your first selection for a monitor. And if you're going to buy a Mac Pro, buy a real keyboard and mouse, not some cheap junk. One for FCP specifically, is over $100 by itself, and some are more, depending on how high a quality model you really need. Apple's is considered to be very good, and I agree with that.