MBP 15 with external video card or iMac Pro for FCPX RED & ALEXA?

[FilmIndustryGuy]

MBP 15 with external video card or iMac Pro for FCPX RED & ALEXA footage? I'm assuming that these days FCPX mainly goes after video cards to render instead of CPU so isn't it better to just get an external card that can be replaced over time? Wondering about how many actual years can one have a high end footage editing machine since these things go for around $3,000 and lose value.

 

[casperes1996]

FCP X uses all the compute power available, which means CPU and GPU simultaneously. Obviously for the most part that means the GPU is the most important piece of the puzzle, but some tasks aren't as suited for GPUs as others. Both suggested options would be good, but if money is not a concern I'd recommend the iMac Pro. You can still eventually plug in an external GPU if necessary, but you also get much, much better hardware in the machine itself, and that's not just CPU and GPU. You also get more RAM (neither machine can be upgraded down the road - at least without going to an Apple service provider) and that. 10G ethernet would also be great for hooking up to certain setups in the pro video space.

 

[Poki]

Upgradeability might not be as great as some hope - the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 is limited after all. After a certain point you'll see diminishing returns simply because the PCIe x4 provided via Thunderbolt will be saturated, and there's not really anything you could do about that except hoping that Thunderbolt 4 will provide higher bandwidth in combination with CPUs offering more PCIe lanes.

So you will most probably get better performance by getting an iMac Pro. The CPUs offered there are much faster, the 16 GB Vega 64 isn't bad either, and the faster and more plentiful ECC RAM surely helps too.

Having said that, even the high end non-Pro iMac would give you great performance with 64 GB RAM, the Radeon Pro 580 and its highly clocked quad-core CPUs. And it would be the cheapest option by far.

 

[casperes1996]

Upgradeability might not be as great as some hope - the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 is limited after all. After a certain point you'll see diminishing returns simply because the PCIe x4 provided via Thunderbolt will be saturated, and there's not really anything you could do about that except hoping that Thunderbolt 4 will provide higher bandwidth in combination with CPUs offering more PCIe lanes.

That's also a very fair point. TB4 will offer more bandwidth, however not more lanes. It'll be PCIe 4.0x4 instead of 3.0x4, which is equivalent (roughly) to PCIe 3.0x8.
But even then, the hardware of the current Macs is TB3 and whatever TB4 brings is irrelevant to the current hardware.

Combining the bandwidth of several Thunderbolt ports may be a posibility though. With some clever hardware in the enclosure you could theoretically take two TB cables from the computer to the enclosure and get PCIe 3.0x8 (or a little less as a result of the added latency and bandwidth loss from the signal splitting and such)

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Red footage is 8k if I remember correctly I wouldn’t want to be using anything less than an iMac Pro for that it’s that simple, it’s the only machine Apple rates for the job.

If I was you i’d Do some serious research about the best machine for the job anyway this is a time to know exactly what you are buying and why.

 

[casperes1996]

Red footage is 8k if I remember correctly I wouldn’t want to be using anything less than an iMac Pro for that it’s that simple, it’s the only machine Apple rates for the job.

If I was you i’d Do some serious research about the best machine for the job anyway this is a time to know exactly what you are buying and why.

You don't need to edit the 8k footage live though - Make proxy footage linked to the original media, edit the proxy then export the original. Full quality but without the performance requirements.