The max'd MBP16,1 has performed better than the entry/base iMacPro for video-specific tasks in internal testing, including hardware encode. Going to two-pass encodes and the difference was minimal (slight edge to MBP16,1). This is likely due to i9 vs. Xeon. Almost easily MBP16,1 outperforms max'd MP5,1 in most tasks.
The MP7,1 entry model might benchmark close to the iMacPro base, but it really is not. Believe base iMacPro is 3.2 GHz 8-Core Xeon W-2140B and MP7,1 is 3.5 GHz 8-Core Xeon W-3223. Upgraded model tiers is a different comparison.
Have seen benchmarks of MBP16,1 at or equal to MP7,1 performance but there is absolutely no way that would be sustainable for weeks/months/years of operation. I really like the hardware of the MBP16,1 and glad I purchased mine to replace an aging MBP, but it's not a desktop workstation. Cannot even pretend it is for more than a few days.