Just to be clear, it's not about them taking 3 days... it's more like a month.
To clarify dates. Final Cut Pro X 10.1 came out 12/18, a week before the first delivery of nMPs, therefore Apple's disk image files for that model were made before that, on the older 2012 model, or they would've automatically had the updated version.
They delivered the first batch of Mac Pros a week later, including demo units at some of their larger "Flagship" stores, such as 5th Ave NYC, Grand Central NYC, San Francisco, etc. All of these top stores have been displaying demo units with the non-GPU aware software since about december 23rd, so it's not just 3 days.
I spoke to the professional sales department in the 5th Avenue NYC location and they were
I agree that most nMP buyers are not walking into stores. On my 4 visits, I saw perhaps 10 people who even took the time to look at it. Of them, half went straight into FCPX, the rest into Aperture (which also was an older version, but not GPU enhanced).
I spoke to two of the people who were tinkering with FCPX, and neither noticed the older version was running. Both had similar "Hater" attitudes towards the newer model. It was a mixture of "my old one is better" and "that's it?".
This is what set me off. I took the time to explain to them that I noticed the older version, but they didn't. As far as they knew, the new Mac Pro was a dog at editing video, or at the very least, not what it was hyped to be.
As far as it being a logistically difficult thing to update all the Mac Pros to the latest version, I originally thought it was just my local store neglecting to hit the update.. or unwilling to click it without explicit permission from Apple. What I learned from my talks with the 5th Avenue store was that Apple essentially has a single disk image on a central server for each model. Every night every demo computer re-loads a copy of that image, so they are exactly the same when they start the next day.
Once they update the original image in Cupertino, all the store servers are pushed that image and within 24 hours, every demo computer in the country has those updates.
As a software developer, I am assuming they have a much bigger deployment waiting to go out, perhaps with 4K sample videos and screens, and because they neglected to snap an image before working on the bigger update, they are not pushing the current (unfinished) update.
Oh well..
As for real world benchmarks... Like the BruceX test, here's something you can try to compare with that does not involve any particular video footage:
1. Load FCPX and create a new project at 1080p, 30p
2. Drop "Pages" from the Generator and change the duration to 8 minutes. On my computer the background render for this is 2:30.
3. After the render, drop "Clouds" at the beginning, from the Titles and change it's duration to 8 minutes too. This takes 6:30 to background render on my computer.
4. After the render, add a "Romantic" filter to the "Pages" clip. On my computer, the render is 7:58.
5. A share of this to a Master File takes 2:45, and produces an 8.25 GB ProRes MOV.
6. Loading it into Compressor, with the output set to the "Apple Devices HD (Best Quality) takes 3:45 seconds. Oddly, when I disabled the additional instance, it's 30 seconds faster... possibly because of the cache.
To optimize speed, I exported from/to an internal SSD.
My previous benchmarks were based upon comparing renders of sample footage (with added titles to force re-renders) using the MacBook Retina that sat next to the Mac Pro in the store. In those tests, there was no definitive advantage to the Mac Pro.
Assuming Apple has not updated the demo units, I will do this test on their quad-core, 16 GB, D300 demo and the MacBook next to it. Eventually, I will run this on the same unit when they finally update it.... or on my Hex-Core, 32 GB, D700 whichever comes first.
To be honest, my hope is the updated version crushes these times... To justify the purchase price.
[/long-winded response off]
