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11 MBA Rendering Times

S

slight32

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 31, 2014
58
1
Can anyone give me an idea of whether an 11" MBA / i5/8gb will be able render up to 40 minute videos, consisting of mostly talking heads with side-by-side slides and basic graphics, with no effects other than transitions and maybe some green screen shots?

If the above is nonsense please let me know what info is required.

I intend to connect to a 1080p screen for the actual editing, which I'm told the 11" will cope with, but it's the rendering and export than I'm wondering about.
 
motorazr

motorazr

macrumors 6502
Oct 24, 2006
327
75
The Frozen Waste...wait. Duluth, Minnesota.
Assuming you're rendering to 1080 from 1080. . . on a new model... I've got no real idea.

. . .What I do know, is that my mba (2011 / i7@1.8 / 4GB ram) and the intel 3000 graphics set would take forever. It will edit quickly (reading and writing to SSD is great), but the rendering of a 5 minute clip took nearly an hour the last time I tried.

I would expect the 5000 chip to be much improved... maybe a few hours?

Hopefully I'm not just providing useless commentary...

EDIT:

Oh, and the clip I edited was just color-corrected footage from a Canon 5D MkII. No fancy effects.
 
Last edited:
S

slight32

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 31, 2014
58
1
Dweez said:
Wouldn't most any system be able to do the rendering, the difference between them being the time needed to complete the job?
Click to expand...

I was wondering if it might get bogged down and freeze, or take far too long...as in hours.
 
Boyd01

Boyd01

Moderator
Staff member
Feb 21, 2012
7,689
4,572
New Jersey Pine Barrens
I shoot 1080p24 HQ Sony XDCAM EX and it works fine on my 2013 11" i7/8gb/512gb MBA. I suppose the question is "compared to what" though. I used to shoot a lot of video in this format when I had a 2008 15" MBP (core2 duo 2.4ghz). The MBA is 2x to 3x faster than that old MBP.

I don't shoot a lot of video these days, so the MBA is perfect for me. When you're lugging a big camera with mattebox and pro video tripod, you will appreciate the size/weight of the 11" MBA.

The main shortcoming is that you can only drive one external monitor, so you can't use two big screens on the desktop and need to settle for the 11" screen for either the canvas or timeline.

I am still using Final Cut Pro 6, which still meets my needs. No idea how the current version would run. But it's hard to imagine "rendering of a 5 minute clip took nearly an hour". Has been almost a year since I did a big project, but IIRC, rendering a 5 minute clip would only have taken a minute or two at the most.

I previously had a 2011 13" i5/4gb/256gb MBA and it also worked fine. But rendering on the 2013 MBA is probably 30% to 50% faster.
 
K

Kurso

macrumors 6502
Sep 10, 2013
304
3
slight32 said:
I was wondering if it might get bogged down and freeze, or take far too long...as in hours.
Click to expand...

You can always deprioritize the process so that it doesn't Impact overall system responsiveness.

In terms of time it is extremely variable based on rendering source characteristics and what your pipeline is actually doing.
 
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