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How much faster is a new Pro vs a G5 dual 1.8?

senseless

senseless

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 23, 2008
1,890
260
Pennsylvania, USA
I was at the Apple store today, but could not get this question answered. If I upgrade my G5 dual 1.8 desktop to a new MacPro quad 2.66, how much faster will it be for Final Cut HD video work?

A one hour HD video can take nearly 2 days to encode on my G5.
 
Much faster,

I went from a Dual G5 1.8 to an 2008 octo 2.8 when I moved to HDV early last year & I seem to remember my old G5 being roughly the same speed-ish with DV, as my mac pro is with HDV.

Im using raw HDV & not an AIC on my timeline and a full HDV conform with at least 1 colour correction filter on each clip takes about 1hr 30mins for 1 hr footage & then roughly 4 minutes to save it (FCP7, Snow Leo & striped RAID) - AIC should be much quicker as you won't need to conform.

I know that doesn't answer your question exactly as Im on a 2008 octo 2.8, but it'll hopefully give you an idea.
 
4X faster? That would definitely be worth the expense to me. It's hard to compare specs as there are so many variables in the computer architecture. Those are good real time numbers to compare to; thanks!
 
I know someone who went from the last G5 Power Mac to the 2009 quad Mac Pro and said he could easily tell a difference in rendering/multitasking.

I mean, don't expect anything spectacular but HD work will a lot less painful and output will be definitely be a lot faster.
 
Even switching from another Intel machine to the 2009 quad will be huge jump. As previously stated, you will see about 4x faster speeds across the board. For even better perf., I would suggest adding a couple smaller SSDs in software RAID 0 for some ridiculous improvements over the G5. when I switched, I noticed about a 6x speed jump in some areas. If you can soring for it, go with the octo model to future-proof yourself for more core-intensive apps.
 
I've got a 8-core 2.8ghz MP... to give you an example of render times, this is the export I did earlier today:

61min 720p ProResHQ sequence to MPEG2/AC3 (one-pass CBR@7.3Mbps) took approx 13mins in Compressor with frame controls on.

I had a 2.5ghz dual G5 before this and there is flat out no comparison in using Compressor (with a virtual cluster enabled).
 
You might want to upgrade to Final Cut Studio 3 while it's cheap.

Final Cut HD won't run on a intel mac.
 
Create a benchmark sequence

Two days to encode HD material on a G5 1.8 DP.
I will not contest your stopwatch, but as you ay many variables are in play.

I use a G5 2.0 DP (model PowerMac 7.3) and have 3Gb of memory.
I process native HDV material (source = HDV, timeline = HDV, output = HDV).
My latest project 34 mins takes me about 2 hoyrs to render (when I drop all cache an temporary files - to simulate a clean render without reusing real time editing rendering results).

Converting with compressor to DVD Best Quality 90 mins setting (Mpeg 2 + AC3) takes 10 hours (5 mins for audio, the rest for video.

Personally I am not so happy with :apple: walking the benchmark path to claim speed improvements. It places itself in the WIntel league.
Apple is oser oriented and should have use-benchmarks.

I would like to suggest the creation of a FC benchmark sequence to have be able to answer Senseless' question.

Regards
Coen
 
By encoding, I mean the time it takes Toast to convert an HD quicktime video to HD for non-BluRay burning. I realize this is a very slow process. I should have been more specific...
 
Senseless

This indeed is a different kind of "speed test", nonetheless interesting for comparison.

By adding this extra info you will receive replies as to whether Toast is the best tool to convert HD material to SD DVD.

IF you have Final Cut Studio I and bigbossbmb will advise you to use Compressor as it generates the best results with you being able to control the output quality by setting the parameters. Browse this forum on Compressor and you will find some notes on Georges Lucas being bit-perfect by means of tuning the parameters to the extreme.
Just phantom: Two hours of SD DV material has a native site of ±20Gb. 2 hours of SD DV material on a DVD can max be 4.7Gb. Any conversion, it being Toast, iDVD or Compressor, you will have to make choices. In Toast and iDVD you hardly have any choices to tune. In Compressor you can choose a lot.

Left or right: it takes time.

In my case: Converting a HDV 1080@50i movie of 34 moins with compressor to DVD Best Quality 90 mins setting (Mpeg 2 + AC3) takes 10 hours (5 mins for audio, the rest for video.
On a G5 2.0 DP
 
Nice those Geekbench scores but ... "Also, keep in mind that Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance which is why, for example, MacBook and MacBook Pro scores are so similar, despite both having radically different graphics adapters."

Those scores hardly say anything about the normal usage of a Mac.

Thus the proposal to start a use-based speed test.
And since this is a video forum, let us use FCP as a basis.

Cheers,
Coen
 
I had a Dual G5 1.8 a couple of years ago when I was working with DVCAM. Speed was no problem. As soon as I made the switch to HiDef the Dual was simply to slow. I now have an 8-core and with FCP and Compressor it just took about 17 minutes to encode a half hour to burn a DVD. You'll be very happy if you make the switch as I think HiDef is just too much information for the old Dual to handle.
 
Without getting into benchmarks (which really don't mean much to me), I can attest to the fact that the Intel Mac Pros of any generation are significantly faster than the G5s ever were for rendering. Like bigbossbmb, I owned a dual G5 prior to my 2008 MP 2.8 Octo. It's night and day.
 
It´s ...

... very simple: If you want to do anything regarding HD video, forget about G5, period. My well proven rule of thumb is, that an equally clocked Core 2 Duo is double the speed compared to a dual G5, the Nehalem processors give you an additional 10 to 50% increase clock to clock compared to the Core 2 Quad, so you can get an idea where this is heading.

HD means a big NO NO NO for any G5, the faster you learn this, the more you will enjoy HD video.
 
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