Premiere Pro CS6 and 15" Retina MacBook Pro

[4God]

Don't know if this is the correct place for this thread, but here goes...

Anybody running Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on a 15" Retina Macbook Pro?
If so, how's the performance? What's your exact setup?

[boch82]

Work fine, same bugs when I work off my Mac Pro. Just make sure you use external storage.

I have the 15" retina 2.7 processor 16gb ram and 768gb hard drive.

[4God]

Cool, thanks for your reply. Yeah, I'm thinking of using one of these for use at my home studio and one of these for work in the field.

I was also wondering about render/export speeds too. I'm trying to decide on wether or not to get a new 27" iMac or the 15" Retina Macbook Pro. Part of that decision making process is balancing the need of portability and the other part is how well Apple and Adobe Pro apps run on those machines. I'm leaning towards the notebook with a Thunderbolt display but I'm hoping they update them soon with USB 3.0.

[matteusclement]

4God, what are you working with? DSLR footage? Tape / mini dv?

[4God]

Ah, good question. I'm working with DSLR footage from T2i's and 60D's. Shooting and editing a new kids TV show airing soon on Baby First. I try to ingest as much as I can in the field and then come to my home studio to edit/finish. Currently on an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro with dual SSD's, 16 gigs of RAM and the AMD Radeon 6750 GPU with 1 gig of vram. Not that it's not sufficient, but could sure use more power for render speeds and exports. I currently use both FCPX and Adobe Premiere Pro for projects. Mostly FCPX for the TV show but every now and then FCPX's bugginess shows itself and is really frustrating.

I like the Prelude/Premiere/After Effects workflow. I have even went the route of ingesting and making subclips in Prelude, rough edit in Premiere Pro, then export XML for FCPX for finishing. That actually seems to the best flow for me right now but again, just really looking for feedback on performance on hardware.

[4God]

Still looking for feedback. Also trying to decide between getting the 15" rMBP and a Thunderbolt display or go 27" iMac route. I do still have my early '11 15" cMBP as a portable workstation now but that Retina version sure is tempting.

[smetvid]

I hate to tell you but the CPU and GPU isn't going to be that much faster to really make a major difference. The 15" retina is faster but not enough to justify the cost to upgrade. Even internal drive speed is going to be marginal since you already have SSD drives.

If you are doing extreme rendering with corrections in the field then you may be looking at about 20% to 30% faster. If all you are doing is ingesting and light cutting then I doubt you will even notice a difference.

The same goes for the latest top of the line iMac. They are definitely faster but still only about 30% compared to your current machine. To some people that 20% to 30% means a lot although I personally question if it really makes them more productive or if they just think they are.

Now since you are a CS6 user like myself do you have support for the OpenCL acceleration on your 15"? I have the 2011 17" and can use full GPU acceleration with the special openCL Mecury engine support Adobe created for these machines. If I recall the 15" wasn't supported for whatever odd reason. That may be different now. If that is the case then I doubt you will see a huge performance increase between the CUDA support and your current OpenCL support in CS6. A friend of mine just bought the 15" retina and CS6 allows him to use OpenCL or CUDA for acceleration so it appears the OpenCL is opening up a bit. Honestly though outside of bragging rights his machine isn't making him any more productive with CS6 then my machine.

Personally I would suggest holding off unless you honestly feel that 30% difference is going to affect your production.

[4God]

Originally Posted by smetvid

I hate to tell you but the CPU and GPU isn't going to be that much faster to really make a major difference. The 15" retina is faster but not enough to justify the cost to upgrade. Even internal drive speed is going to be marginal since you already have SSD drives.

If you are doing extreme rendering with corrections in the field then you may be looking at about 20% to 30% faster. If all you are doing is ingesting and light cutting then I doubt you will even notice a difference.

The same goes for the latest top of the line iMac. They are definitely faster but still only about 30% compared to your current machine. To some people that 20% to 30% means a lot although I personally question if it really makes them more productive or if they just think they are.

Now since you are a CS6 user like myself do you have support for the OpenCL acceleration on your 15"? I have the 2011 17" and can use full GPU acceleration with the special openCL Mecury engine support Adobe created for these machines. If I recall the 15" wasn't supported for whatever odd reason. That may be different now. If that is the case then I doubt you will see a huge performance increase between the CUDA support and your current OpenCL support in CS6. A friend of mine just bought the 15" retina and CS6 allows him to use OpenCL or CUDA for acceleration so it appears the OpenCL is opening up a bit. Honestly though outside of bragging rights his machine isn't making him any more productive with CS6 then my machine.

Personally I would suggest holding off unless you honestly feel that 30% difference is going to affect your production.

Words of wisdom...thank you. I agree, I'll wait out at least another generation and see what's next. I do have OpenCL support on my machine too and that really helps with Premiere Pro CS6. I was able to try a friend's 15" rMBP last night and believe it or not, my machine felt just as fast if not faster. Thanks again for your great feedback.