Macbook pro 450 vs 460 - Different in Final Cut Performance?

[nptech]

Hey guys,

About to pull the plug on my video editing and development machine.

Just wondering if anyone can tell me if there is a significant difference between the 450/455/460 macbook pro for final cut performance.

I'm not concerned about final render speed, purely the experience of scrubbing through the timeline. Wanting the editing process to be as smooth as possible.

Thanks!

 

[sevoneone]

What video formats will you be working with and what type of filtering do you plan to apply? I would think any of them will perform very well for 1080 HD. If you're looking to do 4k and stacking a lot of filters, the 4GB of VRAM alone on the 460 will help a bit. Unfortunately, no one has really done a side by side comparison with all three flavors of GFX chip running FCPX that I have seen, plus most FCPX benchmarks tend to focus on the render times and not general application performance. So, it is hard to say where the sweet spot is until someone lines them up and gives us some hard numbers and impressions.

TBH, the thing I find makes the biggest difference in timeline/edit performance (ignoring rendering as you said) is the speed of your storage media first, and the amount of RAM you have second. Since you're on a laptop, that means external storage. At minimum I'd have a USB 3.0 SSD for an edit drive these days.

 

[nptech]

Would be working with 4k native or pro res footage I think. I think i'm leaning towards the 460 as I don't plan on upgrading the laptop for a good few years.

Will be getting an edit drive for sure, but not until I pay off the macbook pro... which... may be some time lol

 

[joema2]

Would be working with 4k native or pro res footage I think. I think i'm leaning towards the 460 as I don't plan on upgrading the laptop for a good few years.

Will be getting an edit drive for sure, but not until I pay off the macbook pro... which... may be some time lol

Editing H264 4k is one of the most challenging things for any computer or software to handle. It is 4x the data of 1080p, so it would theoretically take a computer 4x as fast to deliver the same responsiveness as when editing 1080p.

Using proxy files will improve performance, but you have to dedicate the time and drive space to generate and hold those.

In general I'd suggest the highest-possible configuration for 4k editing. People get by with less, esp. if editing a few minutes of 4k from an iPhone. However for significant amounts of content the fastest possible machine will avoid a lot of frustration. This will also use a lot of drive space, so any internal storage will be filled up fairly soon. A fast external drive is needed, not a slow bus-powered USB 3.0 drive.

In some cases -- say for very large libraries -- even a RAID array of spinning drives is not fast enough. This is because FCPX does a lot of 4k and 8k random I/Os when building and maintaining the image thumbnails in the Event Browser. Spinning RAID arrays improve sequential performance but not random I/O performance. In that case an SSD drive is better since they are better for random I/O. However 4k implies a lot of storage, so that equates to a larger external SSD drive. I have an 8TB OWC Thunderbay Mini with 4 x 2TB Samsung EVO 850 in RAID-0, and it's a lot faster than other spinning arrays I've used.

ProRes 422 is roughly 8x the size of camera-native 4k, that's another issue. It reduces the CPU load but greatly increases the I/O load and space requirement.

 

[dollystereo]

This is why proxy exist, I don't understand why people keep saying that we need super expensive computers with lot's of raids and speed. You can easily create in FCPX (or similar) proxy files when importing, in 720p for instance to edit your material. The final render will take some time, but the editing process is very fast, even in older hardware. I edit 2k and 4k in a 2011 macbook pro.

 

[ColdCase]

Need is somewhat subjective, but certainly if you don't mind the time it takes to create proxi files and render/export the final video; and have the disk space just, about any computer that runs FCPX will do. The need is for immediate gratification or workflow efficiency drives one to more capable machines with large monitors(s) GPUs, SSDs.... .

 

[dollystereo]

Need is somewhat subjective, but certainly if you don't mind the time it takes to create proxi files and render/export the final video; and have the disk space just, about any computer that runs FCPX will do. The need is for immediate gratification or workflow efficiency drives one to more capable machines with large monitors(s) GPUs, SSDs.... .

Yes but editing 4k directly ingested from the camera is ridiculous. We have even 5k, 6k and 8k right now! Don't expect the computer to catch with these.

Most of the people I know, try to edit raw material from their go pros and they fail miserably. Ultra compressed, processor intensive, etc...you only have to proxy et voila!
You have to realise that even the iPhone can do 4k now, so a lot of people want to edit this size of footage, but don't understand the complexity of the matter.

 

[mabok]

Any footages I received, I would logged it into proxy. Footages from camera usually have different codecs and such. We would normally "generalize" all of them into ProRes 422 proxy for ease of editing.

Computers can't handle with all different types of codecs.
Video codecs is one thing... don't forget audio as well.

Well, maybe I might be wrong.
Do share us any pro tips on your editing workflow if anyone of you have any.

 

[ColdCase]

Yes but editing 4k directly ingested from the camera is ridiculous. We have even 5k, 6k and 8k right now! Don't expect the computer to catch with these.

Most of the people I know, try to edit raw material from their go pros and they fail miserably. Ultra compressed, processor intensive, etc...you only have to proxy et voila!
You have to realise that even the iPhone can do 4k now, so a lot of people want to edit this size of footage, but don't understand the complexity of the matter.

I think I said just about any machine that will run FCPX will edit proxi video just fine. I have no problem editing RAW Go Pro or iPhone 4K, but I do have a robust machine.

 

[dollystereo]

I think I said just about any machine that will run FCPX will edit proxi video just fine. I have no problem editing RAW Go Pro or iPhone 4K, but I do have a robust machine.

=)

 

[joema2]

This is why proxy exist, I don't understand why people keep saying that we need super expensive computers with lot's of raids and speed. You can easily create in FCPX (or similar) proxy files when importing...

The OP aid mentioned FCPX (which has long had excellent proxy support) but not everyone uses FCPX. Up until very recently Premiere CC did not have proxy support and your option was try to edit 4k natively or go through a cumbersome external transcoding and link up procedure.

Also even proxy does not solve everything, and it incurs a big additional step when transcoding. If you just play around with some iPhone videos it's no big deal but if you do any serous video work it can take a lot of time and disk space. That is exactly why Adobe stressed for so many years "no need for transcoding, no need for proxy". Being able to edit native camera files is a big workflow advantage.

Unfortunately that period is coming to an end with the advent of widespread H264 4k. Even FCPX is not fast enough to edit large amounts of that natively although it does much better than Premiere.

I have the fastest 2015 iMac available and use an 8TB SSD RAID-0 array. With significant amounts of multicam 4k -- even using proxy -- it can get bogged down. It is very usable and I'm successfully using it on a 5TB library. However it's not like 1080p where everything was lightning fast.