Professionals Successfully Push Mac Pro to Absurd Limits With 558-Day Video Timeline in Final Cut Pro

[Chupa Chupa]

you couldn't be more wrong. Bugatti is perfect example. They have built the Veyron just to proof the engineering excellence. Not to make money! In fact, that project lost money but the result is pure delight. If you think that metric for innovation is money then I don't think we will continue this discussion in a constructive manner as you are blatantly ignorant to what innovation is.
Btw, the inventor of a wheel didn't make money, yet the innovation is still used!
For crying out loud, does everything has to be about money for you to even move a finger?

Actually, I think you couldn't be more wrong.

The invention of the wheel came out of a need to more easily and efficiently haul heavy loads and carry people. The empires with the technology prospered greatly from it (and captured lots of land too). So, yes, of course riches were involved in the invention of the wheel.

Bugatti (VW) as well as every other auto manufacturer routine make one-off concepts to develop and test technology for future mass-market models. It's part of the R&D budget, which is intended to reap dividends later down the product cycle, not in the concept model itself. The original Veyron concept was not build for kicks and giggles. It was a pure business decision. Sorry to bust your utopian ideals. Money makes the world go round, truly.

 

[Freida]

Actually, I think you couldn't be more wrong.

The invention of the wheel came out of a need to more easily and efficiently haul heavy loads and carry people. The empires with the technology prospered greatly from it (and captured lots of land too). So, yes, of course riches were involved in the invention of the wheel.

Bugatti (VW) as well as every other auto manufacturer routine make one-off concepts to develop and test technology for future mass-market models. It's part of the R&D budget, which is intended to reap dividends later down the product cycle, not in the concept model itself. The original Veyron concept was not build for kicks and giggles. It was a pure business decision. Sorry to bust your utopian ideals. Money makes the world go round, truly.

Yep, you are right. We should all do everything for profit and nothing else. We should all be only thinking about ourselves and no one else. Oh, wait a minute, we are already doing it. Oh, another financial crisis cause of wall street is getting greedy? Nevermind, it will fix itself later so we can go back to greed again.

Yep, we live in truly innovative world and we can all proudly call it that way.

I'm sorry that I was so wrong but I'm glad you have corrected my vision now so I can see more clearly. Thank you for that

 

[MrX8503]

Lol at the trolls. The Mac Pro is innovation and the machine is a marvel. I've built PCs for many years and I laugh at rigs with water cooling or ten fans with the tower being bigger than your desk.

I've moved on from the days of building beast rigs to building rigs with less and less moving parts. When you can get a PC down to no moving parts, that's impressive.

Looking at the Mac Pro, it's only moving part is 1 fan and it has DUAL GPUS! You can't even get a PSU that small thats fanless. The Mac Pro is innovation in the PC space people.

Beast rigs is akin to the Ironman MK1 and the Mac Pro is like the MK3.

 

[prestonkd]

This doesn't prove anything. They used the same video clips on every layer because they knew that using different ones would slow it down. Give us a useful test that actually means something. What about a 15 second composite effect with 500 layers? Can it real time render that? If not, how many can it handle? This is a puff piece and provides no actual information about whether the new Mac Pro is powerful or not.

 

[TallManNY]

You mean like this?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/red-mac-pro-auction-price,25208.html

Yep, that is what I was thinking about. But that was also a one off.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Yep, you are right. We should all do everything for profit and nothing else. We should all be only thinking about ourselves and no one else. Oh, wait a minute, we are already doing it. Oh, another financial crisis cause of wall street is getting greedy? Nevermind, it will fix itself later so we can go back to greed again.

Yep, we live in truly innovative world and we can all proudly call it that way.

I'm sorry that I was so wrong but I'm glad you have corrected my vision now so I can see more clearly. Thank you for that

Your sarcasm notwithstanding, you wildly misstate what I wrote to fit your own ideology. Even socialist & communist governments have a currency, monetary policy, budget, and some sort of industry to fuel GNP/GDP. Grow up.

 

[Truffy]

I hereby ban all instances of the phrase "iMovie Pro" or "iMovie on Steroids."

So stacking the same clip and stretching the timeline to a pointless extreme does it all for you?

 

[rei101]

Come on people, you all should be smarter than that!

That test is not pushing a damn thing! I be you could do the same with Final Cut Pro 7 running in a 12" powerbook.

FCPX is just playing back the top video, is not doing any rendering. I would like to see the same test but having every video at 50% opacity THEN is when you are going to see FCPX actually processing something.

Otherwise the only thing you are doing is sucking a load of data from the hard drives.

I can not believe you all are falling for that. There is not an innovation at all, it is just an scam. You can do the same thing with FCPX or any video editing software in any computer if you are super bored and have time to spare in useless experiments.

 

[kingtj]

Umm, sure ...

And as always, the rip-off PC copy-cats will still be stuck using a butchered-up Hackintosh configuration to force OS X to run on them (probably with a bunch of limitations like this or that feature not really working, due to driver issues), or they'll be on Windows 8 -- the big reason I want a Mac in the first place!

Do you know who will be oohing and awing next year? All the PC customers over the Mac Pro rip offs. This design will be stolen. And now that they know how to make a thermal core that small, are getting TB 2 chipsets for motherboards and fast PCI flash, PC makers will release lower priced versions of this because Apple did all the hard work already for them. That's who.

 

[merlinmage]

Professionals Successfully Push Mac Pro to Absurd Limits With 558-Day Video T...

Actually, the people with "butchered hackintoshs" can use their PCs/Macs with full speed under OSX, while people with iMacs are limited to Nvidia mobile GPUs, low powered PSU and not ideal speedstates on the CPU because, well, the aluminium case is on fire tempwise. I really like my Dualboot system, never crashed once in the 7 months since I build this machine. Oh and btw, decent OC @4,3 really makes a difference, especially when I put a second GPU in later this year for Resolve.

 

[epic-retouching]

lol where are the haters now? Maybe they fell into the trash can they so often talked about. Simple minded negative thinkers will always run when proven wrong.

----------

Lol at the trolls. The Mac Pro is innovation and the machine is a marvel. I've built PCs for many years and I laugh at rigs with water cooling or ten fans with the tower being bigger than your desk.

I've moved on from the days of building beast rigs to building rigs with less and less moving parts. When you can get a PC down to no moving parts, that's impressive.

Looking at the Mac Pro, it's only moving part is 1 fan and it has DUAL GPUS! You can't even get a PSU that small thats fanless. The Mac Pro is innovation in the PC space people.

Beast rigs is akin to the Ironman MK1 and the Mac Pro is like the MK3.

well said! People need to understand that not everyone is a 15 year old thinking the more widgets on their desktop, the more rainbows inside their LED lit machine, the more glass windows for every screw that holds the beast together, the more noise from fans, the sound of bubbling water is not cool once you leave the teen years.

 

[casperes1996]

Yeah, but

You should list what hardware you are talking about. Some very tech blog (ars technica I believe...?) said that for the price, you can't do better, performance wise, (not even talking about the design). That ain't my expertise, but I bet you can't build a Mac Pro clone for much less, if any less.

But the computers you could build, wouldn't come with the resell value of a Mac Pro. N'or would they come with OS X (and yeah, you could mackintosh, but that's not exactly legal, n'or is it as nice as legit OS X), and then there's the free apps that come with OS X of course. And of course the Apple support. The resell value alone is enough to make the price difference though.

 

[Truffy]

the sound of bubbling water is not cool once you leave the teen years.

Seriously, how long has it been since a stock Mac ran with water cooling?

 

[jrlcopy]

From my discussions though, the new Mac Pro is great but thunderbolt can't do Capture or Output 1080i/p 444 RGB video because the Thunderbolt PCI express bus isn't fast enough.

It can edit it, just can't capture the rawness.

 

[linuxcooldude]

I find it pretty laughable how many people support the nMP through wrong statements and non-existent tech knowledge. You can't build a better PC for less? Oh yes you can! Most people think that the D700 are workstation grade GPUs, when in fact they're not. They are just 7970s with 6GB VRAM. Big deal. OS X per se can't use SLI or Crossfire aswell (only on export) - another decent screw up, when you think Apple was "so nice" building 2 GPUs in this "workstation" grade computer. Also, there are no FirePro drivers for OS X, they only exist on Win and Linux. Then we have a 450w PSU. For 2(!) GPUs and a Xeon CPU. No wonder clock rates of both CPU und GPU go way down and are limited to low end grade performance, but yeah, Apple buyers don't care about performance, only about design.

Thunderbolt 2 is the best feauture you can think of? Way slower than PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 is coming in 1-2 years. Again, no performance, just style. And a lot of cables on the table. PCIe SSD? Buy 2x500GB 840Pro from Samsung, put them in Raid 0. Additionally to the same performance, you can add multiple SSDs later. With the nMP? Ofc not, you're screwed again.

Seriously, I own the "mobile garbage" part of Apple products, like a MacBook Air and an iPhone 4s, but when it comes to video editing performance (the area I work in professionally) Apple screwed us big time with the nMP. I'd love to see a "pro-grade" machine in Apple's portfolio, but it seems this time has passed, unfortunately. :/

Its more laughable people who try to cut corners in comparing a consumer PC to a Workstation. Putting in Gamer graphic cards and calling them workstation grade is not the same thing. Then throw in two SSD drives on a SATA bus instead of a PCIe slot and claim they are just as good. I have still not seen even an exceptable comparison on a consumer PC vs Workstation comparison on the nMP.

 

[maiq]

You are talking about "building something like a Mac Pro but cheaper. First: Your components don't match those from the Mac Pro, your processor , an ES -1650 is 3.2 G, and the one at the $2,999 Mac Pro is 3.7; you talk about 256gb SSD at $140, and yes, that's the price you can get that kind of memory... for mSATA; for PCI Express, the one the Mac Pro Uses, and much faster than mSATA is more expensive. You talk about a motherboard for $160, but... what kind of motherboard?? Because that's the part that will do the components, and the architecture to bring all the performance of the computer, and that price: 160, well, that's the price for motherboards that support i5, i7, but motherboards that support Ivy Bridge and can use thunderbolt are about double the price.
finally: yo make the math for those components, but... you're not even talking about the gabinet, the connectors, all the additional hardware you need to build the computer, and yes, there's been already comparisons between the Mac Pro and other servers that use the same processor and very similar configurations, and they are about the same price, some of them even more expensive and are bigger and even slower, so THERE'S the innovation factor for the Mac Pro: to have a good price-performance ratio and to be very small, silent and efficient. So no: it's not very easy to make a custom-made computer that will be similar in performance to a Mac Pro and will be cheaper.

I would suggest refraining from judging processors by clockspeeds alone. His processor is a gen old 6 core variant while the standard Mac pro uses a newer quad core. The older 6 core is marginally better than the mac pros starting quad core. Of course don't go around judging processors by core counts alone either. Otherwise people might start thinking AMD's 8 core 5ghz processors need to be in Mac Pros..

 

[merlinmage]

Its more laughable people who try to cut corners in comparing a consumer PC to a Workstation. Putting in Gamer graphic cards and calling them workstation grade is not the same thing. Then throw in two SSD drives on a SATA bus instead of a PCIe slot and claim they are just as good. I have still not seen even an exceptable comparison on a consumer PC vs Workstation comparison on the nMP.

You know that the D700 cards in the nMP ARE HD7970? They're clearly NOT FirePro Cards, that's just marketing bs. There are no FirePro drivers for OS X and the cheap PSU couldn't really handle a full sized FirePro W9000. Additionally SLI and/or XFire doesn't work on OS X (yet? I doubt it).

 

[chirpie]

So stacking the same clip and stretching the timeline to a pointless extreme does it all for you?

No. Don't be that guy. I'm referring to the culmination of the very strong base that Apple built on with the do-over of this software. There's so very little left that it can't do and so much that it can do much better and faster than many other NLE on the market.

It's not a be all end all program for editing, but my statement was clearly meant to be a call out to those that still insist this program isn't able to 'cut it' with the big boys.

----------

You know that the D700 cards in the nMP ARE HD7970? They're clearly NOT FirePro Cards, that's just marketing bs. There are no FirePro drivers for OS X and the cheap PSU couldn't really handle a full sized FirePro W9000. Additionally SLI and/or XFire doesn't work on OS X (yet? I doubt it).

They aren't HD7970 cards anymore than they aren't FirePro cards. They're a proprietary in-between Frankenstein's monster hybrid with pretty low power requirements for the performance you get.

EDIT ADD-ON: Actually Tom's Hardware has the HD7970 consuming MORE juice than the W9000. (314w vs 274w) So... there's that.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Hey, thats lots of fun. I tossed off-the-shelf components together into cheap cases and slapped an OS on em too when I was a hotshot teenage know-it-all. In the Windows world, there's no reason not to, that's all anyone's doing. All we had to do is compete on price, race each other to the bottom, and define success as seeing whose investor $ could outlast their competitions on perpetual losses.

It took a little time and expense, but eventually we all learned there's more to computing performance than adding up a stock parts pile.

Not that any of you aren't hiring several thousand physicists and engineers to manage environmental variations to keep your components actually functioning at or anywhere near published spec, but... you aren't. You can hamfist a liquid cooling system in there, and stuff it in an acoustically insulated box to keep it quiet, and that'll help, but add that up. And if that's not enough of a defeat, you can't include anywhere the level of software these things do, nor or a functioning company to do the assembly or stand behind your awesome product. All you can afford to do is toss a pile of parts together, and say here's this pile of parts, as-is. Use em up and then get some new ones.

Still proud of your ability to add up cost on a few parts and come up with a figure a few hundred under what a complete product costs?

It's not impressive, anyone can do it, plenty have, and eventually all realize there's more to a computer than the immediate sum of its most basic components.

 

[merlinmage]

They aren't HD7970 cards anymore than they aren't FirePro cards. They're a proprietary in-between Frankenstein's monster hybrid with pretty low power requirements for the performance you get.

EDIT ADD-ON: Actually Tom's Hardware has the HD7970 consuming MORE juice than the W9000. (314w vs 274w) So... there's that.

Never hear of downclocking? Apple downclocked the cards to a bare minimum since even Apple can't break the law of physics. Again, they're just ordinary 2011 (!) consumer cards.

Hey, thats lots of fun. I tossed off-the-shelf components together into cheap cases and slapped an OS on em too when I was a hotshot teenage know-it-all. In the Windows world, there's no reason not to, that's all anyone's doing. All we had to do is compete on price, race each other to the bottom, and define success as seeing whose investor $ could outlast their competitions on perpetual losses.

Must be easy to live in a stereotypical world, isn't it? Btw, if I bought a Mac Pro for 6,8k, the "slam it together" PC would cost 3k less. This isn't about Apple's special pricing anymore, that's just Apple ripping off people big time. The old MacPro was a WS and very good priced, but well, prosumer are all that matter these days.

 

[linuxcooldude]

You know that the D700 cards in the nMP ARE HD7970? They're clearly NOT FirePro Cards, that's just marketing bs. There are no FirePro drivers for OS X and the cheap PSU couldn't really handle a full sized FirePro W9000. Additionally SLI and/or XFire doesn't work on OS X (yet? I doubt it).

AMD said in comparison of their Firepro & Radeon cards they are not exactly the same hardware wise. Changes in the GPU & board level are still different then the Radeon series.

The differences are not only on the hardware side but changes in the drivers and testing the Workstation cards in all the Pro software to guarantee compatibility. Something you cannot get with gamer cards.

Must be easy to live in a stereotypical world, isn't it? Btw, if I bought a Mac Pro for 6,8k, the "slam it together" PC would cost 3k less. This isn't about Apple's special pricing anymore, that's just Apple ripping off people big time. The old MacPro was a WS and very good priced, but well, prosumer are all that matter these days.

Two things you have to keep in mind when doing that type of comparison.

1) Workstation Vs consumer home PC:

Workstation: Designed for professional, enterprise and business most often used to make money with a higher level of support and higher hardware costs. High speed connections

Home PC: Designed for home use tends to be more lower costs that cuts corners with hardware to fit within that price point.

PC workstations costs just as much and often more then the Mac Pro. So we need to be comparing Workstation to workstation.

2) OEM VS Build it yourself:

Of course DIY computers are much cheaper...no labor costs with no overhead costs compared to OEM. But you have to supply your own support, something most companies & businesses don't want to do.

So its not about ripping people off. Its about the average joe who does not want to build their own but pays someone else to do it for them with a guarantee every thing will work. Something like that comes at a higher price.

 

[GeneralChang]

Money is the best metric of innovation as true innovation generates money.

And that’s how Gallileo ended up so fabulously rich and not at all on house arrest for the rest of his life.

Innovation is measured by the ability to change the world around us. The more innovative something is, the more it’s going to change our lifestyles.

But seeing as how Apple is more profitable than Google, it’s a moot point anyways.

----------

If so why people are trying to innovate all the time ?
What they will get from it ?

Innovative products will make you rich if you market them right, don’t get me wrong. But so will copying other people’s innovative products, so how much money a product is making can’t really be used as a metric for measuring innovation.

 

[chirpie]

Never hear of downclocking? Apple downclocked the cards to a bare minimum since even Apple can't break the law of physics. Again, they're just ordinary 2011 (!) consumer cards.

You're saying they're the same. I'm saying they aren't. They're close, but they aren't. It's a proprietary card that's a retooled version that is CLOSE to this other card. I'm not one of those people who thinks these cards are also directly comparable to the Firepro (No ECC on the D cards that I know of) but I'm not taking the quick way out of saying they're exactly the same as another card because again, they aren't. And this whole debate doesn't even bring up the drivers on the cards, which, again, you typically have to pay a premium to get to, and that also counts for something. (In the world of consumer vs pro) (EDIT ADD ON: Oops, linuxcooldude already brought up this point. Sorry for the brow beating...)

When you have to say they're the same except for the following differences, that's a big red flag they indeed aren't the same. They don't perform the same, they don't test the same. (Gaming vs pro applications are the big duh here) Yes, they're similar, close. But not the same. I stand by my statement: They're a proprietary in-between.

And I only brought up the power requirements because your previous post made it sound like the Fire Pro was more pro than a 7970 simply because it sucks more juice than a consumer card (Which was false.)

And just how many consumer cards had 6GB of vram per card in 2011? What was the sticker price?

 

[merlinmage]

What is special about doubling the VRAM in 2013/14 (!) from 2011 cards? AMD and Apple made a deal to use the leftover chip from a previous generation and throw in some more VRAM, since 6GB sounds so "professional".

Again, maybe Apple or AMD wrote some "uber special proprietary" drivers, but that doesn't change the performance of the cards that much. Try running two GPU with a 450W PSU? Good luck with that.

Ofc you can't say that the cards are the same, since the nMP D700s would have real FirePro drivers (Lin&Win), a PSU about 700w and above.

One can't deny that Dell or HP charge extra prices for their workstations, but keep in mind that most companies change the GPU / other hardware inside those WS aswell. And there are also small companies who use DIY machines, why shouldn't they?

 

[linuxcooldude]

What is special about doubling the VRAM in 2013/14 (!) from 2011 cards? AMD and Apple made a deal to use the leftover chip from a previous generation and throw in some more VRAM, since 6GB sounds so "professional".

More to it then just any special deals. In developing the nMP one can't just switch to newer video cards during the middle of the production and planning stage. These had to be custom built since there are no PCIe slots to put them inside. Doing so would take even longer with higher costs.

Again, maybe Apple or AMD wrote some "uber special proprietary" drivers, but that doesn't change the performance of the cards that much. Try running two GPU with a 450W PSU? Good luck with that.

Apparently it does work and quite well from the demos and tests once it was released.

Ofc you can't say that the cards are the same, since the nMP D700s would have real FirePro drivers (Lin&Win), a PSU about 700w and above.

Typically Apple always included graphic card drivers in the operating system on their OEM built systems. Should not be any different now. Just because its drivers not downloadable like the Windows/Linux version does not make it any less a workstation Graphic card.

And there are also small companies who use DIY machines, why shouldn't they?

And note you said small companies. Because they can more easily support such systems on a small scale. Medium to large company not so much. They have to have a higher level of support. And more importantly they want accountability if something goes wrong.