I want to get a mac pro but refuse to buy one today given the year old specs on the GPU and the 1gb of ram.. I was really bumed out when we didnt see a little updat at wwdc.. but thats another story.. So I am thinking, maybe I can buy the new SR Macbook and have the best of both worlds.. Any benchmarks out yet in comparing the mac pro to the new mac book? looking at the entry model on both. thanks.. I appreciate your help.
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Mac Pro 2.6 vs MacBook Pro for video editing
- Thread starter newportmac
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I do video editing on a PM quad w/7800GT, a MP 2.66 w/1900 and a MBP 17" stocker. They all work, but the Pro towers are in a class of their own. And, you are definitely not going to have issues with the 1900, and probably not even with the 7300. I think your fears are unjustified.
If you need portability, get the 15" LED MacBook Pro and connect it to a 23" or 30" Display. Otherwise, the Mac Pro is the better option.
If you're just cutting SD footage, or HDV, I'd say go with a MacBook Pro. I had a Mac Pro and a MBP, and there was nothing I was working on that my MBP couldn't handle. And I could edit down by the lake, at a coffee shop, sitting in the kitchen, on the couch, etc. So I ditched my Mac Pro...at least for now. Yeah, it's faster, but in this case, I just wasn't using the tower to it's full potential. The only reason I would look at a tower is if you need a lot of horsepower for heavy rendering, encoding, transcoding, or if you're doing HEAVY Motion or After Effects work. Other than that, the MacBook Pros are MORE than adequate. I'm cutting a feature film on mine right now as a matter of fact.
Well if you need to match SD with HD which is 2k uncompressed, then maybe you should have a very fast MP with RAID
. Typically you can tell a noob low power user by the vague "video editing" term. Uncompressed, compressed, 2k or 4k res? There is a huge difference depending on what CPU intensive software capabilities you're going to be needing to work with.Or how fast, and many things/combined tasks you need to happen as quickly as possible. A G4PB was used on location with external SCSI RAID box running off the of PC card slot, to work with the freeway action scenes on the Matrix Reloaded. Academy award winning editor Walter Murch use 4 G4 desktops as a system to edit the $100M Cold Mountain film. TV series 'Scrubs' is edited on a very tight time sensitive budget with FCP, back in 2003 by two bicoastal editors, on the original 17in PB's.
Not enough horsepower to do a Pixar studios animated feature film however
.I suspect even the soon to be updated MB with SR and better integrated GPU will be enough to do 'video editing' on iMovie, or FCE, even with compressed low-bandwidth HDV-HD type material.
With the new ProRes 422, you don't even need a huge xserve raid with fiber channel. You could probably get away with a dual-drive external eSata raid setup.
Unless you're doing uncompressed HD or something, a MBP is more than adequate. But if you want a desktop, an iMac will also work great.
Unless you're doing uncompressed HD or something, a MBP is more than adequate. But if you want a desktop, an iMac will also work great.
Well the Mac Pro is definitely going to be faster than the MacBook Pro. So I guess it comes down to a matter of what you need most- power or portability.