Will my Mac Pro Tower handle FCPX?

nedcam

nedcam

Well-known member
I would like to migrate to FCPX from my present FCP6 on OS 10.5.8 and will probably get a 27" iMac in the spring. As of now I need to limp along with my tower which is probably five years old. Here's the specs:

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro3,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB
Memory: 6 GB
Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B05
SMC Version (system): 1.25f4

I don't know if I can improve the speed or memory, can I? Will this work with FCPX and/or do I need to upgrade to a newer OS?

Many thanks for your advice!
 
My Mac Pro is older than yours and doesn't break a sweat in fcpx.

you may want to invest in a better graphics card (yours isn't listed, but I'm running a Radeon 5770), more memory (at least 12GB) and a solid state hard drive to run the os from.
 
There is less of a learning curve from FCP6 to Premiere pro CS6 than to FCPX.
Have you considered this instead. It will allow you much more flexibility than the magnetic all automatic timeline. You can also change the Premiere Pro CS6 shortcuts to the FCP ones and boom 2days learning and you are rolling.

I only use FCPx for short videos and slide shows. But premiere is more professional oriented for fictions.
 
Phenixone said:
There is less of a learning curve from FCP6 to Premiere pro CS6 than to FCPX.
Have you considered this instead. It will allow you much more flexibility than the magnetic all automatic timeline. You can also change the Premiere Pro CS6 shortcuts to the FCP ones and boom 2days learning and you are rolling.

I only use FCPx for short videos and slide shows. But premiere is more professional oriented for fictions.
Click to expand...

I'm glad I read this! I have the slightly older config of the OP's. I hear that the big attraction of FCPX is file management/ Asset management. Do you agree?
I'm ready to shed FCS2 as well. Been mulling the very switch of which you speak.

BTW, I have the ATI 3870, which on my monitors is just fine. Not sure if a 5770 is worth it unless the OP is pushing a higher Rez monitor.
Have a read here....
http://www.hwcompare.com/1181/radeon-hd-3870-1gb-vs-radeon-hd-5770/#texelrateExplain
 
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Phenixone said:
There is less of a learning curve from FCP6 to Premiere pro CS6 than to FCPX.
Click to expand...


I'm going to have to both agree and disagree with this, and just to set the context of my comments, I spent years and years with FCP (up to v7) then I've done a couple of years on Premiere Pro (CS5, CS5.5 and CS6). I edit everything from 3 minute shorts to 2 hours films. I know most of the shortcuts (there are always new surprises you can learn from other people) and we currently have three edit bays using Premiere Pro & FCP X.


Phenixone said:
[Premiere Pro] will allow you much more flexibility than the magnetic all automatic timeline.
Click to expand...


How so? Premiere Pro has one mode only, that of manually moving things around. FCP X has TWO modes, one being the magnetic timeline (which when you want it is awesome) and then the same old way of thing things like FCP 6 and Premiere Pro still uses (you can turn the magnetic timeline on and off at will, it's not a case of one or the other). If you have assets positioned where you want them and then you turn the magnetic timeline back on, they don't suddenly bounce along the timeline somewhere else. This is a common miss understanding, usually (not referring to the poster above) when people haven't spent enough time (i.e. more than a few minutes) to learn how to use it.


The magnetic timeline can save you lots of time, or (as indicated above)it can get in the way. The good news is you can choose when you do and don't want it to do it's stuff. Awesome.


Also, the trimming tools in FCP X are much better (in terms of speed and saving time) than Premiere Pro.


Phenixone said:
You can also change the Premiere Pro CS6 shortcuts to the FCP ones and boom 2days learning and you are rolling.
Click to expand...


Yes you can, but you can also change the shortcuts in FCP X too, and the FCP X shortcut editor is streets ahead of the Premiere Pro version. 2 Days of learning FCP X and boom you should be up and running :)


Phenixone said:
I only use FCPx for short videos and slide shows.
Click to expand...


Over the last couple of years we've done the same, but FCP X is constantly evolving and since the last few updates it's finally made it to the point where we could edit everything just as easily (or more easily) in FCP X as in Premiere Pro. The only exceptions are if we wanted to round trip with (say) After Effects, which we are doing less and less anyway.


Phenixone said:
But premiere is more professional oriented for fictions.
Click to expand...


In what way?


Premiere Pro can do short form and long form with no difference. F


CP X can do short form and long form with no difference either. In fact, in many way the meta data handling and built in proxy workflow make FCP X the better tool for longer projects, if you don't need round tripping to after effects and audition.


OK - so now let's move on to my current thinking on the various products.


--- FCP 6/7 ---
People say it's dead. Well, it's still as good today as the day the last updates were released. Lots of TV and films are still edited on FCP 7 and there's no reason it can't be done for years to come. Yes, it needs to render more often, yes you need to transcode, but if you have time within the workflow then FCP 7 is still a great tool. Would I install it and use it in a new edit bay? No.


--- Premiere Pro ---
Premiere Pro CS6. Adobe have brought Premiere Pro a long way in the last 3 revisions (CS5/5.5/6) and there are some awesome features that work really well, and then there are some bodged features that appear to have been rushed and not thought through. Then there are some obvious things missing (like audio syncing).


Premiere Pro's media handling is basic, but this allows you much more flexibility in the organizing the media on the hard disks how 'you' want to do it. It doesn't force you in to storage of media in specific folders, but then you have the responsibility to collect all your media together when it comes time to archive. It also means you can store assets on network drives and use sync tools (e.g. GoogSync) to keep multiple editors / computers in sync with the assets. I prefer the Premiere Pro way of doing things on this.


Premiere Pro is touted as being able to edit natively, and for the most part it does do a good job IF you have good hardware. Currently that means a CUDA card, or a MacBookPro with a supported Open CL GPU. You can edit without CUDA quite happily if you aren't looking for real time playback at full resolution on all media types. Changing to half resolution for editing isn't usually a problem (it's no different to editing with proxy media) and of course it goes back to full res when you pause, so you can easily check sharpness.


The major thorn in the side of Premiere Pro is conforming audio. We often ingest (say) ten hours of native footage and it spends a good hour or more conforming the audio and generating peak files. While you can use this time to keyword and arrange bins, you can't really doing any worthwhile editing of anything that needs audio because playing a clip that hasn't yet been conformed won't play the sound. When ever you copy the project to another computer it re-conforms the audio all over again!


The ability to scrub on thumbnails (just like FCP X) is very welcome in CS6, but alas they didn't give us the option to sort the order of the thumbnails, so it gives you them in what ever order they were stacked in the source bin on import. Yes there are workarounds, but they are a pain.


The MPE (mercury playback engine) generally works well, but as soon as you add a third party effect that is not MPE accelerated (e.g. colorista II) then you lost most of the advantages. The built in "3 way" and fast colour correctors are GPU accelerated (assuming you have a supported card), but they aren't as good as either FCP's built in 3 way or FCPX colour brick or third party add-ons like Colorista II. The Premiere Pro "3 way" introduces banding and posterisation way too easily and is all but useless for major projects.


Rendering the timeline is all well and good, but if you want to export a master file there is some sort of bug that means that Premiere Pro will render everything from scratch when you export. So, saving time on the front end (native editing) costs more time on final export. If you have a supported GPU and used only MPE supported effects things are relatively quick, but as soon as you start using non accelerated effects (including obvious things like broadcast safe) then exports can positively crawl. Of all the three (FCP7, Premiere Pro, FCP X) Premiere Pro is the slowest to export a ready rendered timeline. Between Premiere Pro and FCP X, FCP X seems to be much faster (by about twice or three times), whether the sequence is already rendered or not.


And then there is the AVCHD bug in Premiere Pro that means it simply CAN'T edit natively from some AVCHD cameras (some work, others don't) and since Adobe 'buy' this codec from outside they don't appear to be able to get a fix for this in a timely manor. We've been waiting 6+ months already. My guess is they'll fix is in CS6.5 and expect you to PAY for the upgrade. Shame on you Adobe.


OTOH, Premiere Pro does handle long timelines well enough, finally has a useable multicam editor, though not as good as FCP X, has good integration with After Effects, Audition (for audio) and of course Encore for DVD and Blu-ray authoring. This has been our standard workflow over the last couple of years. It works (most of the time!) and is now finally pretty stable on the Mac. When CS6 was introduced it was pretty unstable (not as good as CS5.5) and lots of Mac people were unhappy. We had to change to Windows for a few months to be able to continue working, but fortunately things have worked out and we're back on Mac. It may actually have been the CUDA drivers that were the problem, but as the end user, we just want it all to 'work' and not crash.


Oh, and you need still need external tools (e.g. Pluraleyes) to auto sync multiple cameras and audio from a multicam shoot. FCP X does a good just of syncing using built in tools, although it does do this as a foreground task


--- FCP X ---
There is so much miss information and miss understanding on the web about FCP X that it's both funny and frustrating. Phrases like 'FCP X is not Professional' are crazily out of date now, yet people like to cling to these phrases as if they were the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They are not.


There are things to like and dislike about FCP X in equal measures. The thing I most hate is the Event/Project folder structures. If we could just break this one restriction then I'd be really happy. I don't like being forced to use local HDDs (we don't have a SAN) and not be able to reference media on a server easily. It can be done using disk images, but not in an easily shared way.


Coming from Premiere Pro, I really like the way Adobe allows you to move all the panels around to suite your own needs, whereas the FCP X screen is more of a prescribed layout and you can't change it.


On the surface, FCP X can look like an unprofessional toy, and that's about where most people leave it. That's a shame, because once you understand how it really works, once you understand the shortcuts, the trimming tools, the inspector, the awesome multi cam etc, then FCP X is a mighty impressive tool for professional editing. The eco system building up around it is growing very fast. There are still a couple of niggles to be worked out, but they 'will' be worked out and Apple has shown good commitment to the community in the 6 updates they have so far delivered in less than 18 months.


The magnetic timeline is something you will either love or hate (depending on what you are doing), but unlike what many people will tell you, positioning your media to specific frames (just like FCP7 & Premiere Pro) is trivial. It takes one keystroke to change mode and one keystroke to go back (it's a toggle). How hard can that be to learn? Now you can have the best of both worlds.


The built in proxy workflow is fantastic. I can edit 4 streams of HD video in a multi cam, in the field, from a USB2 drive on a MacBookPro, then with a couple of mouse clicks I can export the full high quality version at lightning fast speed. I can't do that with Premiere Pro.


The color brick is something else that's come in for a lot of stick. It's not the familiar 3 way colour corrector and I have to admit I didn't like it at all.... that is until I forced myself to use it for a couple of days. Now I realise that the color correction in FCP X is far superior to anything you can get in Premiere Pro.


I've had 10 (ten!!!) color corrections on a single clip using a combination of global correction plus shapes and colour masks that allowed me to tweak individual areas of the frame (all key framable) and it still played back in real time without rendering! Awesome!


The lack of bins made me skeptical at first, but the organisation using metadata and keywords is far more powerful and I'd be surprised if others don't adopt this approach in coming versions.


Later FCP X versions added professional monitoring through decklink cards etc, so that's sorted.


I do feel that audio is still the weakest link - though so far we've been able to work through just about everything.


The idea that people still say this tool is not professional is a joke. It is being used in professional productions already, not just the little guys, but also major productions.


There is nothing we could edit within Premiere Pro that we couldn't edit just as well (if not faster!) in FCP X.


--- Disclaimer ---


Now, I don't want any one to read in to this that I am all for FCP X and totally down on Premiere Pro. I'm not. I use BOTH daily. These are TOOLS not a religion. I'm fortunate to have both and be able to use both. If you can only choose one (which goes for most people) then which you choose should be dictated but the type of productions you make and the tools you like to use.


If you are the kind of person who is lazy, disorganised and likes to spread your media around then Premiere Pro will use it 'as-is' whereas FCP X will only tolerate that up to a certain point, and with certain media types, and after that will collect all your media in to the Events folder.


If you like lots of After Effects integration then clearly Premiere Pro is going to make that a lot easier.


If most of what you do is self contained editing projects and you want excellent color grading tools built in, at what seems like a much cheaper price, then maybe FCP X is the better choice.


In terms of hardware..... Premiere Pro is a true memory hog. I wouldn't want to use that with 'only' 8GB of ram. Yes you can make it work for simple projects, but Premiere Pro likes to cache as much as possible in ram, so all your ram is in use. The more you have, the smoother things seem to run. Without a supported CUDA card (or Open CL GPU), the benefits of Premiere Pro diminish pretty quickly, but when you run everything within the supported GPU environment then things can really fly.


FCP X also has some major hardware requirements. Having a supported GPU is mandatory. Having one of the better supported GPUs makes it fly.


My MacBookPro is faster and smoother when editing on FCP X than my MacPro is! This is partly because the MBP has one of the better GPUs and my MacPro has a GTX285 (chosen for it's CUDA cores). While the GTX285 supports Open CL it's not as good as one of the better ATI cards. I did temporarily put a standard PC GTX570 card in the MacPro to test it and it worked perfectly, and slightly faster, except for not getting the boot screen.


Realistically, if you are going the FCP X route then the latest iMac with i7 and top GPU will do very nicely. If you go the Premiere Pro route you will have to hope that Adobe adds your GPU to the supported list at 'some point' in the future, which could also mean paying for an upgrade, which itself could cost as much as FCP X does in the first place.


The Adobe route will almost always be the more expensive one, though you will typically get more tools along with it. Whether you learn to use them or not is another matter. It seems most people don't...
 
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Wow, excellent writeup, Exact. I'm extremely happy with FCPX.

I also have a 2008 8-core Mac Pro that I've upgraded - 2TB media drives, SSD boot/apps drive, 14gb RAM, 5870 video card. It works quite well, but also worked with less ram and no ssd. However, it's still not as fast as a top of the line iMac, so I'm not going to upgrade it any further. Next year once I see what the promised new Mac Pro brings I'll either get a new MP or iMac. I also recommend using Event Manager X to hide Events and Projects you aren't using at the time. That will keep things from slowing down too.

I don't recommend learning on your own. Subscribe for one month to MacProVideo, lynda.com, etc. ($25) and in about 12 hours you can go through tutorials to really learn the capabilities.
 
Very well written post, Exact! A joy to read. Since I only need color correction and simple edits I am still fine with FCS2 on the same 2008 macpro. Actually I miss the old LiveType...
 
Well written post! Bravo! I'd like to add some first hand experience to that information, also.

As a professional trainer, who has taught many, many, many software titles for several decades now, and currently an FCP trainer, I can tell you first hand that teaching FCP X is way faster and easier than teaching legacy FCP or any other NLE on the market today. Is there a less steep learning curve going from 7 to PPro, than going 7 to X? No, the easiest thing to do is move to FCP X. You'll spend infinity less time learning it compared to other NLEs. This opinion based first hand experience teaching thousands of end users face to face.

The past week I had two trainings in two different cities. My normal MBP training laptop was not available, so I borrowed a Mac Air and FCP X ran on it just fine. I'd not do tons of feature picture editing on an Air, but I was surprised by how stable and quick it was, with a bus powered SSD T'bolt drive. I wonder how other NLE's perform on a Mac Air?

Did that great post up there mention cost, no DVDs or serial numbers to keep track of, lower cost of quality plugins, and how many universities are switching to FCP X? Yes, those two classes I mentioned before were faculties of two major universities switching to FCP X. These are men and women with many, many years of professional broadcast and film mking behind them. They loved FCP X, picked it up super quickly, and told me they never want to use anything else, especially legacy FCP or anything that looks like legacy FCP. These are professionals, my friends. So if professionals are blown away by FCP X and love it that much, how is it not a professional app?

I've taught many long time, seasoned editors in my classes, and every one of them was very impressed.

But basically, the learning curve of FCP X is shorter than anything I've ever taught before.
 
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As long as you have a compatible video card you should be good to go. I have the same machine. You may want to put in a bit more memory. As for the video cards, the Radeon 5770 probably works as well as the 5870, although the 5870 is supposed to have more capability. I have not heard of any real advantage. It is funny, I have been looking forward to selling my tower. I was not sure there was a market for it.
 
I have the same early 2008 2.8 GHz Octo-core, and IMHO, given the glacial pace of MacPro development in recent years this is still a pretty viable machine. Sure a fast 12-core's gonna be faster - maybe 2x or so? But over five 'computer years' (normally about 8-12 'lifetimes'), that ain't all that hella-much. And that high-zoot 12-core's gonna set you back some *serious* coin...

Just sayin'...
 
Once many, many years ago, I taught an FCP class, or was it an STP class, in Chicago...

As for Ted's comments about a 12-core, there is something called the point of deminishing returns. A 12-core would be overkill for video editing today. Will it really make those thousands of dollars back before it is outdated and needs to be replaced? Will it really save you enough time over an 8 core or 4 core to justify the increase in profits to cover the extra costs?
 
BenB said:
Once many, many years ago, I taught an FCP class, or was it an STP class, in Chicago...

As for Ted's comments about a 12-core, there is something called the point of deminishing returns. A 12-core would be overkill for video editing today. Will it really make those thousands of dollars back before it is outdated and needs to be replaced? Will it really save you enough time over an 8 core or 4 core to justify the increase in profits to cover the extra costs?
Click to expand...

Yea the current MacPro's aren't really lacking in the brute force department. The bottleneck for video editing will come down to your HD speeds (ie: Thunderbolt missing at the moment), and better GPU's (which FCPX uses a lot). Having a 12-core vs a 8-core or whatever won't make a huge difference until you hit "render."

I've been tempted time and again to go with an iMac or just use my current MacBook Pro with thunderbolt drives but I sorta realize my current 8-core 2.93Ghz MacPro has zero issues editing the content I have, and when I hit render it's incredibly fast. No real need to switch to anything at the moment and likely wont' be for a long time especially if I'm still using HD primarily.

FCPX is so streamlined it's amazing how well it runs on old hardware. It's a slam dunk from that angle...
 
What I have done is put a couple of extra drives in my Mac Pro tower (2* 1tB) and striped them as a raid array. so they are fast. BTW no matter how fast a thunderbolt comms link is it still has to go on to the Thunderbolt comms link and at the other end a Sata drive. So going direct to a couple of striped drives in the MAC pro will be faster.
 
Unless you are doing something insanely extreme with FX or something, a semi-recent Mac Pro won't hit CPU constraints for FCP X nearly as quickly as you will flood your I/O bandwidth working with various types of files.

Same holds true for Logic when working with audio.

Disks > RAM > CPU ... after a certain point.
 
jagraphics said:
What I have done is put a couple of extra drives in my Mac Pro tower (2* 1tB) and striped them as a raid array. so they are fast. BTW no matter how fast a thunderbolt comms link is it still has to go on to the Thunderbolt comms link and at the other end a Sata drive. So going direct to a couple of striped drives in the MAC pro will be faster.
Click to expand...

Not on my MacPro because the Sata ports are sata 2 and not sata 3, so they are limited to 266MB/s, whereas Sata 3 drives used via thunderbolt are faster than this.

My MacPro RAID 0 with 3x2TB drives tops out at around 240MB/s whereas the same drives raided via thunderbolt are giving me > 400MB/s. So, no, it's not the case that being local drives will *always* be faster, it depends on what level of Sata you have.
 
On a brand new 15" rMBP, maxed RAM, largest SSD internal drive, and a bus powered single SSD T'bolt drive, it out performs the SATA internals and better GPU (5870) in my Mac Pro.
 
Many thanks I stand corrected! The devil is in the detail :-) the speed of change is getting silly....

I can remember when a PC was an 8088 running at 4.77 Mhx with 256kb main memory and the 10MB hard disk was an expensive "business only" add on. Checking the specs I have realised the screen was CGA at 40×25 characters in up to 16 colors. (and 14 inch monitors were the norm). 1982 so 30 years ago.

The problem is you end up swapping one bottle neck for another and some times I wonder if the small speed increase is worth the cost. In that you can spend a lot of money for a speed increase that you won't really notice in practice you just "know" it is there. .

Though somewhere I was reading that the cost effective of an Outside Broadcast system had dropped from 1.5 million to about 50K though I think for one you needed a large truck and for the modern stuff it could be carried by 2 people so the cost of the car was not factored in.

Back to work....:-)
 
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