iMac vs MBP?

dcarstens

dcarstens

Well-known member
My 2013 MBP is crashing constantly with Premiere/Resolve, may be time to upgrade. Any advice on spec'd out MBP vs iMac for 4K edit/grading? Don't think I can afford the trash can reactor.
 
Wow, that sucks. 2013 isn't exactly ancient. I am running PP 2015 fine on my 2008 mac pro 2.8 X 8. What are the specs on your MBP?
 
That's too new to be having issues like that. You may want to look into trashing Adobe's preferences or doing a reinstall of Adobe's software. If that doesn't work do a full reinstall of the OS.
 
I have the retina MBP (late 2012? 2.6ghz, 16gb ram). It's working smooth with FCPX. But wish I had more power at times.
If you don't need to be very mobile the iMac is the obvious choice.
 
Have you replaced the HDD with SSD? This upgrade alone can give your MPB a new life. My BMP 2012 handles resolve and pp 2015 pretty well with projects that are not too big/complex.
 
Hm.... sounds weird. Running cc 2014 on a early 2011 MBP with 16gb ram and ssd for main drive. Are you sure you haven't got some other nastyware that could be conflicting or creating issues for you?

If you still want to go ahead, I'd take an iMac any day over a MBP. I've loved my MBP because it's so flexible, but the machine power is simply too weak once you get over the mobility thing.

Today I'm back in pc land, and after some fiddling around I'd take a pc over an iMac any day :) and this time I've made sure I can do everything on it I could do on an iMac down to connecting thunderbolt drives and rendering ProRes.
If I need to transport files from mac to pc; just make sure you format your external drives in exFat, then both systems can read and write to the drive.
 
legrevedotcom said:
If you still want to go ahead, I'd take an iMac any day over a MBP. I've loved my MBP because it's so flexible, but the machine power is simply too weak once you get over the mobility thing.
Click to expand...

The newer retina MacBook Pros are within a hair, performance-wise, of the iMacs. I wouldn't exactly call them "too weak." The newest rMBP's storage is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than even the Mac Pro. I have a 2015 rMBP i7, 16GB, 1TB SSD that hits nearly 2GB/s off of the SSD.

In fact, unless you're going to max the 5K iMac out on the processor the rMBP is probably going to be faster.
 
If your running the later updated Adobe CC The web is awash with reports of crashes and bugs with firmware...so it mightn't be your computer.

I know a lot of people cutting with MBPs , myself I prefer the iMac because of screen real estate issues . So it really comes down to individual workflows as there appears to be not much difference operationally between the 2 . Both handle 4k (though not sure why you need to edit 4k until you go final)
 
Surf it Mike said:
If your running the later updated Adobe CC The web is awash with reports of crashes and bugs with firmware...so it mightn't be your computer.

I know a lot of people cutting with MBPs , myself I prefer the iMac because of screen real estate issues . So it really comes down to individual workflows as there appears to be not much difference operationally between the 2 . Both handle 4k (though not sure why you need to edit 4k until you go final)
Click to expand...
I've done extensive research and here's what's going on, what the problem is. Late 2013 MBP has GeForce 750M which is causing all the problems in PP. It causes crashes when working with CUDA and 4K footage (the most, but can affect 2K and HD too) , for some reason only h.264 and other compressed codecs (people work with Red footage without a problem). This bug is so big that after a year it still hasn't been fixed and Apple decided to dump GeForce graphic cards. Latest MBP 15" is utilising Radeon, that was the only reason they've released new model (other changes are minor, maybe besides faster SSD, but that was not a purpose to release a new model).

Solutions/options:
- get 2015 model with Radeon graphics
- switch off CUDA and work with OpenCL. Problem is OpenCL can give artefacts when using masks etc. It's slower than CUDA but not by far. Or use "software only", with best possible settings. It is slow (VERY slow) but gets the job done.
- switch to Resolve or something else

I know that I'll be definitely getting MacBook, as movability for me is very important, but maybe you'll be better with more stationary option (just don't go with GeForce).
 
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