New iMac Pro!

Jarek Zabczynski said:
It's a good sign for what the MacPro will be. It'll have to be significantly more powerful than this to even make sense. So that's great news.
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced the MacPro will be much more than a headless version of the iMac Pro with a desktop GPU. I'm not convinced there's a market for much more than what can be configured in the iMac Pro.

I have the iMac 2015 4k on my desk and it's the best Mac I've ever used, I was hesitant to buy it as I had always used Mac Pros but it exceeded my expectations and was an awesome FCPX machine cutting through 4k from the FS7 like a hot knife through butter.

I think the iMac Pro is potentially interesting but I wonder how much real world improvement it'll be over a maxed out iMac 2017? I never found myself waiting around for the iMac 2015 and the 2017 version appears a good step forward so I would need a lot of persuading to stretch the wallet to the iMac Pro despite the gunmetal grey looking badass and 'I Want One' written all over it. Making short form videos in 4k up to about 30 mins never really had excruciating render times anyway and I could have 4 streams of 4k without dropping frames so it's difficult to justify going beyond a maxed out iMac.

I totally get that some people have to deal with a ton of footage from various sources that might need clean up and rendering to proxies but if you're a jobbing video producer making short form videos for the web and internal intranets etc the iMac is a real sweet spot.
 
Nirv said:
...I have the iMac 2015 4k on my desk and it's the best Mac I've ever used, I was hesitant to buy it as I had always used Mac Pros but it exceeded my expectations and was an awesome FCPX machine cutting through 4k from the FS7 like a hot knife through butter....I think the iMac Pro is potentially interesting but I wonder how much real world improvement it'll be over a maxed out iMac 2017? I never found myself waiting around for the iMac 2015 and the 2017 version appears a good step forward...I totally get that some people have to deal with a ton of footage from various sources that might need clean up and rendering to proxies but if you're a jobbing video producer making short form videos for the web and internal intranets etc the iMac is a real sweet spot.
Click to expand...

My 2015 top-spec iMac 27 flies through 4k ProRes but definitely does not cut through H264 4k like butter. If my doc team could use all ProRes acquisition that would be easier, but we have 12 4k GoPros, five 4k drones, gimbal cams, cable cams, 3-axis motion-control cams, two multicam interview teams -- all shooting 4k H264. We have Atomos recorders but prefer not to use those in the field due to complexity and HDMI fragility. Our Inspire 2 will shoot ProRes and we could put a ProRes recorder on our DVX200 but what's the point if everything else is H264?

Since pretty much no computer or editing software is fast enough to smoothly edit lots of H264 4k, this creates a huge computational task of transcoding to proxy in high shooting ratio situations. Since Xeon doesn't have Quick Sync, even a 12-core Mac Pro is slower at this than a 2013 or 2015 iMac. It appears the upcoming iMac Pro will also be Xeon based so unless Apple does some miracle and rewrites FCPX to use AMD's VCE transcoding engine, it will be not greatly faster at H264 or H265 than the 2013 Mac Pro.

Outside this one workflow issue the iMac Pro looks very powerful and even the regular top-spec 2017 iMac has useful improvements. Due to the H264 issue I decided to order the 2017 iMac rather than wait for the iMac Pro. If Apple somehow manages to provide hardware-accelerated long GOP encode/decode on the iMac Pro, that would be revolutionary for everyone stuck in this workflow.
 
joema said:
My 2015 top-spec iMac 27 flies through 4k ProRes but definitely does not cut through H264 4k like butter. If my doc team could use all ProRes acquisition that would be easier, but we have 12 4k GoPros, five 4k drones, gimbal cams, cable cams, 3-axis motion-control cams, two multicam interview teams -- all shooting 4k H264. We have Atomos recorders but prefer not to use those in the field due to complexity and HDMI fragility. Our Inspire 2 will shoot ProRes and we could put a ProRes recorder on our DVX200 but what's the point if everything else is H264?

Since pretty much no computer or editing software is fast enough to smoothly edit lots of H264 4k, this creates a huge computational task of transcoding to proxy in high shooting ratio situations. Since Xeon doesn't have Quick Sync, even a 12-core Mac Pro is slower at this than a 2013 or 2015 iMac. It appears the upcoming iMac Pro will also be Xeon based so unless Apple does some miracle and rewrites FCPX to use AMD's VCE transcoding engine, it will be not greatly faster at H264 or H265 than the 2013 Mac Pro.

Outside this one workflow issue the iMac Pro looks very powerful and even the regular top-spec 2017 iMac has useful improvements. Due to the H264 issue I decided to order the 2017 iMac rather than wait for the iMac Pro. If Apple somehow manages to provide hardware-accelerated long GOP encode/decode on the iMac Pro, that would be revolutionary for everyone stuck in this workflow.
Click to expand...

XAVC from the FS7 is h264 and I could stack 4 streams of 4k on top of each other at 50% opacity with LUTs and CC and not drop a frame, that's more than enough performance for me. I know not all flavours of h264 perform as well as they're not directly supported in AV Foundation, e.g. DJI's h264 but if you're working with codecs that Apple has anointed the performance is rapid.

High Sierra will support GPU accelerated h265 so good news if you have any P4Ps in your company and maybe Apple's support of h264 will broaden and we'll get similar performance to XAVC with other h264 codecs.

It's worth sending in feature requests to the FCPX dev team maybe if enough people ask for better DJI h264 support it'll arrive.
 
I'm with Nirv - my 2012 iMac has never had any issue with XAVC files from the FS7 - nor even the lowly XAVC S from the a6300 occasionally. And I also have the P4P - and am looking forward to using the h265 choice with it. And also agree that the iMac is perfect for "jobbing video producer making short form videos for the web and internal intranets etc".

Forgive my ignorance, joema, but I'm not sure I fully understand the "huge computational task of transcoding to proxy in high shooting ratio situations" when using FCPX. If I'm ingesting P4P h.264 footage, I always check the "Create optimized media" to transcode to PR upon import... yes, sure it adds to file sizes and can take time to transcode ( time that can be spent browsing this forum) - but I'm able to begin the edit immediately while the iMac performs the transcode in the background...and makes editing long-form much more friendly.
 
Nirv said:
XAVC from the FS7 is h264 and I could stack 4 streams of 4k on top of each other at 50% opacity with LUTs and CC and not drop a frame
Click to expand...

Is that XAVC-I (intra-frame) or XAVC-L (Long GOP inter-frame)? The FS7 does both. When I mentioned H264, I meant the long GOP version, which is so common that sometime "H264" is incorrectly used to mean only that version, as I did. If your editing performance is that fast on XAVC-L, that would be interesting.

Nirv said:
...High Sierra will support GPU accelerated h265 so good news if you have any P4Ps in your company and maybe Apple's support of h264 will broaden and we'll get similar performance to XAVC with other h264 codecs.
Click to expand...

I think this is limited to Quick Sync, which Xeon currently does not have in > 4 core versions. To my knowlege it's not possible to meaningfully accelerate long GOP encode/decode using solely GPU methods, because the core algorithm is sequential and not amenable to harnessing the hundreds of lightweight threads a GPU can provide.

Nirv said:
...It's worth sending in feature requests to the FCPX dev team maybe if enough people ask for better DJI h264 support it'll arrive.
Click to expand...

I think FCPX already makes good use of Quick Sync for long GOP H264 support -- it exports to H264 4x faster than Premiere on the same Mac hardware. Decode is also much faster, as shown by lower CPU levels when scrubbing a long GOP H264 timeline. However it's still not fast enough to smoothly edit any version of long GOP 4k H264 I've seen on any machine I've tried.

I did edit some 300 mbps 4k 4:2:2 H264 intra-frame material from a Canon XC15, and that was fast, but it wasn't long GOP.

I've sent in a few requests but the FCPX web feedback page is limited to a few sentences and there's no provision for attachments. It's more typical of a feedback page for a consumer appliance, not a professional app. Maybe I should send feedback to improve the feedback page:)
 
markfpv said:
...Forgive my ignorance, joema, but I'm not sure I fully understand the "huge computational task of transcoding to proxy in high shooting ratio situations" when using FCPX. If I'm ingesting P4P h.264 footage, I always check the "Create optimized media" to transcode to PR upon import... yes, sure it adds to file sizes and can take time to transcode ( time that can be spent browsing this forum) - but I'm able to begin the edit immediately while the iMac performs the transcode in the background...and makes editing long-form much more friendly.
Click to expand...

My doc team can have two drones, two multicam interview crews (thats four or more 4k tripod-mounted cameras), 10 GoPros, a CableCam, two motorized sliders and a roving GlideCam operator running simultaneously. All those shoot long GOP 4k H264. On a busy day we can easily shoot a terabyte of long GOP 4k H264 per day at a single site. If that was ProRes acquisition it would be 8 terabytes, but in that case we wouldn't have to transcode. But the data must be offloaded, checksummed and duplicated each day so ProRes would make that harder.

Transcoding to proxy 1TB of long GOP 4k H264 on the fastest possible Mac for the task (which isn't a Mac Pro) essentially takes all night. So we can't even cut dailies until early the next morning. If something goes wrong with the proxies of a multi-day shoot, it can take several days to rebuild them. This can easily happen since FCPX does not well support a proxy-only workflow -- IOW external proxies outside the library to allow collaborative distribution of a "lean library". E.g, it is intolerant of changes in drive volume name, so each portable drive must be renamed to the same volume name as when the proxies were generated. The slightest mistake such as forgetting to rename a portable drive and trying to relink -- can invalidate the proxies, requiring a total rebuild.

That computational task combined with the current state of FCPX proxy handling is why I'd be interested in any Mac that could build/rebuild proxies faster.
 
Jeoma,

When I got the FS7 only XAVC-I was anointed by Apple and XAVC-L was a dog to work with by comparison. After an update to FCPX XAVC-L became accelerated and was much easier to work with. To be honest I never really used XAVC-L and cannot give you a direct comparison but it was much easier to work with than the 4K video from my Mavic.
 
Nirv said:
Jeoma,

When I got the FS7 only XAVC-I was anointed by Apple and XAVC-L was a dog to work with by comparison. After an update to FCPX XAVC-L became accelerated and was much easier to work with. To be honest I never really used XAVC-L and cannot give you a direct comparison but it was much easier to work with than the 4K video from my Mavic.
Click to expand...

I just downloaded and tested in FCPX some sample 4k XAVC-I and XAVC-L from an FS5. The XAVC-I is pretty fast but the XAVC-L is laggy and slow. That's on a top-spec 2015 iMac 27: 4Ghz i7-6700K, 32GB, M395X, 1TB SSD. It is significantly more sluggish than UHD 4k material from our DVX200, which is also long GOP H264. The DVX200 long GOP media is also laggy but not like the XAVC-L. I'm getting a top-spec 2017 iMac 27 next week and I'll test it on that but I don't expect a huge difference.

By contrast I re-tested some 300 mbps 4:2:2 4k H264 intra-frame material from a Canon XC15. It was lighting fast -- it felt like 1080p it was so smooth.

So there are definitely 4k H264 *intra-frame* codecs which are pretty smooth on a top-spec 2015 iMac or a 12-core New Mac Pro with D700s. But I have not seen a 4k *inter-frame* H264 codec which is smooth in FCPX, even on machines like the iMac with Quick Sync hardware acceleration. Last week when I tested our DVX200 content on a 12-core nMP, it was no faster than on my 2015 iMac.

Admittedly "smooth" is a relative term and what one person calls smooth and fast another might call laggy and slow. Nonetheless I haven't seen any 4k long GOP H264 which I could comfortably edit multicam in, and even the fastest ones are too slow (for me) to rapidly skim and pull selects.
 
Nirv said:
I have the iMac 2015 4k on my desk and it's the best Mac I've ever used, I was hesitant to buy it as I had always used Mac Pros but it exceeded my expectations and was an awesome FCPX machine cutting through 4k from the FS7 like a hot knife through butter.
Click to expand...
What configuration did you use (RAM, CPU, GPU etc...)? Thanks! :-)
 
Danilo Del Tufo said:
What configuration did you use (RAM, CPU, GPU etc...)? Thanks! :-)
Click to expand...

The same as Joema's 2015 iMac 27: 4Ghz i7, 32GB, M395x, 1TB flash drive.

My former colleagues all have one on their desks after we swapped out our Mac Pros for them. If they're updated every 2 years I reckon they won't update before 2019. They use FS7s so until a camera manufacturer gives them cause to upgrade from those cameras there's no rush to think about.

@Joema

I had a former colleague dropbox me over a few short UHD XAVC-L clips and have tested FCPX with it. I get what you mean, that scrubbing is jerky. When playing back the timeline I can stack 2 XAVC_L clips at 50% opacity without dropping frames a, third clip drops frames.

When I do selects I play the clip in the Browser and use hotkeys to fav and mark in/outs and not scrub. I guess this is why I never had an issue with XAVC-L not that we used it on jobs. But I distinctly remember an FCPX that dramatically improved performance of XAVC-L, I guess it must've been playback performance.

In your position I think I might have a dedicated machine (or machines) running 24/7 to handle transcoding straight onto your SAN. I know it's unfashionable these days but getting your camera guys to think about the shooting ratio might be a big help? But hey, I don't know what your business is and there may well be a perfectly good reason why you create so many rushes.

I'll be interested to hear what you say about the 2017 iMac.
 
joema said:
I just downloaded and tested in FCPX some sample 4k XAVC-I and XAVC-L from an FS5. The XAVC-I is pretty fast but the XAVC-L is laggy and slow. That's on a top-spec 2015 iMac 27: 4Ghz i7-6700K, 32GB, M395X, 1TB SSD. It is significantly more sluggish than UHD 4k material from our DVX200, which is also long GOP H264. The DVX200 long GOP media is also laggy but not like the XAVC-L. I'm getting a top-spec 2017 iMac 27 next week and I'll test it on that but I don't expect a huge difference.

By contrast I re-tested some 300 mbps 4:2:2 4k H264 intra-frame material from a Canon XC15. It was lighting fast -- it felt like 1080p it was so smooth.

So there are definitely 4k H264 *intra-frame* codecs which are pretty smooth on a top-spec 2015 iMac or a 12-core New Mac Pro with D700s. But I have not seen a 4k *inter-frame* H264 codec which is smooth in FCPX, even on machines like the iMac with Quick Sync hardware acceleration. Last week when I tested our DVX200 content on a 12-core nMP, it was no faster than on my 2015 iMac.

Admittedly "smooth" is a relative term and what one person calls smooth and fast another might call laggy and slow. Nonetheless I haven't seen any 4k long GOP H264 which I could comfortably edit multicam in, and even the fastest ones are too slow (for me) to rapidly skim and pull selects.
Click to expand...

That has more to do with the format than the performance of the machine. A lot of people struggle with XAVC-L in FCPX. Even though these formats are h.264 based there are slight differences under the hood how they are utilized. If we think of h.264 as just h.264 then 4k from the GH4 or DVX200 should be as sluggish as XAVC-L but it isn't. Either Sony or Apple need to improve the implementation of the XAVC decoder. Getting a faster machine may or may not improve performance depending on just how bad XAVC-L is implemented in FCPX. CPU wise there isn't much difference at all between the 2015 iMac and the new 2017 iMac.
 
Thomas Smet said:
That has more to do with the format than the performance of the machine. A lot of people struggle with XAVC-L in FCPX. Even though these formats are h.264 based there are slight differences under the hood how they are utilized. If we think of h.264 as just h.264 then 4k from the GH4 or DVX200 should be as sluggish as XAVC-L but it isn't. Either Sony or Apple need to improve the implementation of the XAVC decoder. Getting a faster machine may or may not improve performance depending on just how bad XAVC-L is implemented in FCPX. CPU wise there isn't much difference at all between the 2015 iMac and the new 2017 iMac.
Click to expand...

Interestingly, it appears editing XAVC-L is actually a little smoother in Premiere CC on the same 2015 iMac vs. FCPX, although they are both quite laggy. That is rare -- usually FCPX is much smoother on H264. This implies FCPX's handling of XAVC-L could be improved. However FCPX exports XAVC-L to H264 2.5x faster than Premiere so it's already much faster in that regard.

The video metadata indicates the DVX200 and XAVC-L both use High 5.1 format profiles, two reference frames per GOP and M=3 which is the number of frames between I or P frames. They differ slightly in GOP length, which is 6 frames for XAVC-L and 8 frames for the DVX200.

Re whether a faster machine would help, I tested DVX200 multicam material on a 12-core Mac Pro with dual D700s, and it was no faster or smoother in FCPX than my 2015 iMac 27, so I wouldn't expect XAVC-L to be dramatically improved on a "faster" machine, whether that's the top-spec 2017 iMac 27 or an iMac Pro, but there's always hope. I'll test the 2017 iMac next week; it does have a significantly improved GPU and a newer version of Quick Sync so maybe that will help.
 
^^ Max in that video linked above does some of the best benchmark comparisons on the internet for Mac products. Really solid answers to some of the questions most reviews never give me. If I spend $X more, what is the REAL benefit? I spent the last few weeks running various benchmarks on different machines including 2014 iMac, 2015 MBP, 2017 MBP, 2017 iMac (stock), 12c Trashcan MP, etc. and it's a little frustrating really...depending on the software you're using (FCPX/CC), whether you're in 2K or 4K, etc. there's a huge difference.

When it comes to render time, FCPX is unmatched by Premiere on Apple hardware with Resolve catching up more and more. If you're in HD/2K, from what I've seen running all my tests, FCPX can actually provide a very similar render time per machine. The differences expand significantly once you move to 4K and beyond. Computers are so fast now that they'll chew through almost anything in HD/2K fast enough that the CPU/GPU isn't a bottleneck anymore...we've hit a glass ceiling.

Overall I've found myself a tad frustrated. Even a 2014 iMac can be 2x faster than my 2015 MBP in some things, but other times they match. It used to be more binary but software optimization, I/O, and the overall speed of even the basic hardware available has changed the game significantly. If Adobe can start optimizing Premiere for Apple hardware the way Blackmagic has, it would be incredible...
 
Looks like a great machine but out of my price range probably, once fully outfitted with enough RAM, SSD, etc. I will probably pick up a regular 5K iMac as they are such a good deal now and I am not really a power editor and don't do heavy motion graphics. If the new iMac Pros start at $5k, that means the one I really want is probably $7,500.00, too much for the small amount of client editing that I get paid for.
 
iMac Pro is beautiful design and a feat of engineering.

Hardware wise, you can do just as well for way cheaper. This has often been the Apple story, but iMac Pro takes it to a new level.

All fine and well, but at the end of the day you are paying big time for the aesthetic design. I could see this being very desireable for a high end San Fran agency where presentation and image is everything. As for me, my editing office is a personal workspace and paying such a large markup on hardware for the (beautiful) exterior aesthetic design doesn't add any value for me.
 
filmguy123 said:
iMac Pro is beautiful design and a feat of engineering.

Hardware wise, you can do just as well for way cheaper. This has often been the Apple story, but iMac Pro takes it to a new level.

All fine and well, but at the end of the day you are paying big time for the aesthetic design. I could see this being very desireable for a high end San Fran agency where presentation and image is everything. As for me, my editing office is a personal workspace and paying such a large markup on hardware for the (beautiful) exterior aesthetic design doesn't add any value for me.
Click to expand...

Not entirely true. You are also paying for the platform and ecosystem. Nobody walks around accusing BMW for having a tax vs a Honda. Both get you from A to B equally well and yet lots of people find value in the BMW for whatever reason.

Over priced to you is not over priced to everybody else. A lot of people find tremendous value in using a Mac computer where they never have to worry about replacing parts or viruses or just the overall complication of the platform. That is worth the cost to some the same as the extra cost of the BMW is worth it to some people or why some people would rather pay $15 for a gourmet hamburger vs McDonalds. Both hamburgers are beef (well sort of).

It is also about size and noise output. Sure you could build a large honking tower with some similar specs but thats just it. You have a large honking tower with lots of fans generating noise. That computer doubles as a space heater. The iMac Pro is compact and generates little noise and heat. That again matters to some people.

I just think it is silly to compare two machines just based on specs in much the same way it is silly to compare a BMW to a Honda just based on the engine size, number of cylinders and the gas milage. That never really tells you the overall experience of using both cars. I'm not saying Honda is bad in any way. I had a Honda Fit and my wife now has a Honda HRV. Good cars but people pay an extra $10k+ for a BMW for a good reason. We need to stop judging a productive computer we use every single day for work just based on some hollow specs. Specs are not always everything.

I am now a UX Designer/Developer for a living and user experience rarely cares about cost. User experience has a lot of value to many people. If it didn't people wouldn't buy Macs, iPhones, BMW's or whatever else. Everybody would drive a beater, shop at Wal-Mart and eat McDonalds. quality has value and user experience has value. If it doesn't have value for you that is completely your right of course but that doesn't mean it can't have value for the rest of us.
 
Apple's design is great. I worked for them for a couple years. I owned a Mac Pro. I own a Macbook Pro. I have built Hackintoshes. I have built PCs.

The reality is, a big honking tower can be just as quiet as Apple's top end. Mine is. It's setup with liquid cooling in a sound dampened case from Lian Li in a beautiful dark aluminum. I have a few ultra quiet Noctua fans as well. I can drop in the latest and greatest hardware piece meal when I need it. And, I could build my tower to be far smaller - I just like the ample room to work with. I have 10 internal HDDs and a honking GTX 1080 TI and I have ample room to move around inside.

Nothing against Apple, I'm wearing my Watch Series 3 and have the iPhone X here. I border on fanboy. But it's a false dichotomy to say Apple is BMW and PC is Corolla. Apple is BMW. PC has offerings and options from Geo Metro to BMW to Maserati.

Regarding the ecosystem (OS X), Apple does some great things with software but frankly Windows 10 is edging out OS X these days, except for in the mobile and consumer space. Apple does amazing things with OS X for laptops, it's why I own a Macbook Pro. OS X also has a lot of very slick consumer friendly features that just out-class Windows 10. But in the professional workspace, after years of working on a Mac, I prefer Windows 10. There is nothing OS X offers these days to pros that Windows 10 doesn't do just as well or better. And the virus thing is simply no longer true. Apple even had to change their marketing: OS X doesn't get "PC" viruses. Key addition. Fine. Windows 10 doesn't get "Mac" viruses. The unix base of OS X is no doubt excellent but with its massive rise in popularity, it's no longer as immune to attention as it once was, and I haven't had a virus problem on my PC for about a decade now.

To clarify, I am not coming down on OS X or Apple. OS X vs Vista was a no brainer. OS X vs Windows 10 is, these days, Leica VS Zeiss. But the clincher for me is that Apple's focus is undoubtedly on the mobile mass market consumer end of things. I am glad to see them paying more attention to pro users lately and believe they make great products and will continue to make even more compelling pro products. They are a great choice, they just aren't an inherently better choice.

Fact is, if I had to choose between an equivalent top end Mac or top end PC system (spec'ed out like I have mine), I would pay $1000 more for the PC side due to a preference these days for Windows 10 and hardware flexibility. But that's just me.

All respect to those who love the Mac - I actually do too. I just think it's patently false to state that the Mac is the BMW and the PC is the Honda. PC by definition is open platform and can be whatever you make it to be. Mac sources all the exact same components used on a quality high end PC and adds a TPM chip which is the only thing that blocks OS X from running on PCs. It's why it's so easy to build a Hackintosh. Apple's design is undeniably superb. I think the iMac Pro is beautiful piece of design and hardware and, like I said, an impressive feat in engineering.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top