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Not Pro? 13" MBP beats i7 HP Spectre - 7x faster

Deanster

Deanster

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 6, 2005
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Common video editing task, I do this all the time, and part of what's causing me to move on from my beloved 2010 17" MBP is that anything with HD video just takes forever.

This vlogger imports a ~6 minute 1080p video clip from a camera, and then times the h.264 single pass export.

Spectre is an i7 with 16 gigs of RAM - out-specs the 13" MBP non-touchbar by a mile. Running Premiere, the h.264 export took almost nine minutes.

MBP knocked it out in ONE MINUTE 23 SECONDS, running FCP X.

Some of this is the hardware, and some is how optimized FCP X is, but... it's hard to argue how 'Pro' your Windows/Premiere rig is when it takes 7x longer to do a several-times-a-day task like transcoding/export.

He also shows off the MBP's faster SSD by duplicating a 26GB file on both machines. 1'24" for the HP, only 36 seconds on the MBP. 2.5x faster?

 
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By definition a 'professional' is someone who does something as their profession. In many cases their current employment of that profession means they don't get to choose what software they use.. and in many cases it isn't Final Cut.
 
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Understood 100%. I'd be very interested in seeing how the MBP did running this through Premiere.

At the same time, lots of us have both FCPx and Premiere available, and a choice between Win/Mac, and if FCPx on the MBP blows the doors off other configurations... it becomes the go-to option.

7x faster (or just the 2.5x faster of a large file copy, which is pure hardware) is damn persuasive when you're billing your time.
 
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Qwaf said:
By definition a 'professional' is someone who does something as their profession. In many cases their current employment of that profession means they don't get to choose what software they use.. and in many cases it isn't Final Cut.
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And quite easily a lot of companies buys macs to run FCP. So In this occasion, the editor has the perfect setup
 
Deanster said:
Understood 100%. I'd be very interested in seeing how the MBP did running this through Premiere.

At the same time, lots of us have both FCPx and Premiere available, and a choice between Win/Mac, and if FCPx on the MBP blows the doors off other configurations... it becomes the go-to option.

7x faster is damn persuasive when you're billing your time.
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It absolutely is and it's very impressive. If you're in a position where you can use Final Cut then it seems like a no brainer.

MecPro said:
And quite easily a lot of companies buys macs to run FCP. So In this occasion, the editor has the perfect setup
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Of course. The point is that if the only definition of a machine for professionals is that it runs Apple's software well.. then the market of professionals it addresses will become increasingly small. This is why, if Apple wants to keep this part of the market happy, they should be putting in more effort to provide good competitive options for them.
 
The point isn't that it runs Apple's software well.

It's that it runs any well-coded, well-optimized software well, and even crappy software benefits from 2x+ faster SSD read/write speeds, since that's often more of a bottleneck than CPU/GPU speed for common activities.

If Adobe can't be bothered to optimize their code, then how is it that somehow Apple's fault?
 
It's not Apple's fault, but if someone lives outside of Apple's first party apps then it doesn't matter the reason for it - if others offer more options for more powerful and up to date machines that run that software better then it could become a problem for Apple.

The blame game is irrelevant, if doesn't change the end result.
 
I'd disagree - if Premiere on high-spec Windows/HP Spectre is getting beaten by 7x on something as simple and common as an h264 export, something is seriously broken.

Either the MacBook is absolutely killer hardware, the Spectre is trash hardware, or Premiere is absolutely trash at this particular task, right?

You may be forced to use trash software that runs 1/7 as fast on higher-spec hardware, of course. But at some point you need to admit that there's a real problem with the software if someone else is doing the exact same task 7x better on lesser hardware.

It may not be enough to cause someone to leave Premiere, but... it sure doesn't make Premiere/Adobe look good.
 
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premier is a complete pile of garbage and has been for a very long time

i do very much love adobe

but yeah, use FCPX

infinity times better

adobe is for photo, design, layout and motion design, but not video or audio

premiere and audition are rly horrendous compared to final cut and logic

i haven't used avid in years, but the thing is, those programs just never make use of your hardware.
you'll be rendering everything in the CPU while the GPU, which is better at that, just sits there

at the end of the day, obviously it's all about personal taste and workflow, but when FCPX first came out, and i saw how it was using the GPU, i instantly stopped using all other editing programs and never looked back
 
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Deanster said:
I'd disagree - if Premiere on high-spec Windows/HP Spectre is getting beaten by 7x on something as simple and common as an h264 export, something is seriously broken.

Either the MacBook is absolutely killer hardware, the Spectre is trash hardware, or Premiere is absolutely trash at this particular task, right?

You may be forced to use trash software that runs 1/7 as fast on higher-spec hardware, of course. But at some point you need to admit that there's a real problem with the software if someone else is doing the exact same task 7x better on lesser hardware.

It may not be enough to cause someone to leave Premiere, but... it sure doesn't make Premiere/Adobe look good.
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When I built the Hackintosh in my sig, I originally had trouble getting OS X installed so I'd run Premiere on Windows 10 in the meantime, but it absolutely refused to take advantage of more than a couple of the 12 cores, and barely touched the 980 Ti GPU in both CUDA or OpenCL. Exports were slow like the video shows and I was never able to figure out why it wasn't utilizing what was available more efficiently.

Premiere in OS X is a big improvement once I was able to finalize a stable system on 10.11 on the same hardware, but it's still not seemingly within touching distance of FCPX. I'm now tempted to try and move my production team and I to FCPX after seeing how much more optimized it is to pull performance out of hardware. Exports, timeline renders, and general navigation of projects with effects/color applied to clips is always a drag in premiere no matter the hardware, and if we could shave some time here and there it'd really add up.
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Mcdevidr said:
He says in the video why he didn't compare. Did you watch it?
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That was a dumb throwaway reason to not just boot up Premiere and take 5 minutes to do one more export. That's useful data regardless of if it supports his agenda or not.
 
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if you are a PRO you choose what you use not others for you, so this video makes sense
 
video is a meaningless comparison, two totally different programs ?

what's the point it shows nothing. I would like to see both machines using the same app otherwise it's completely invalid.
 
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