Pro Video Editor Says MacBook Pro Beats Out Superior Spec'd Windows Machines In Real-World (9to5mac.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Reviews for Apple's new MacBook Pro have yet to officially go live, despite a couple false starts earlier this week. Those should arrive any day now ahead of a retail release for the machine, but one pro video editor today published his early hands-on review after using the new 15-inch model in a real-world setting. The review also aims to address some of the early criticisms of the new MacBook Pro from pros, showing how the machine held up in a real-world, professional environment. The author Thomas Grove Carter works at Trim Editing, a studio in London where he edits "high end commercials, music videos and films" using Final Cut Pro. The review specifically focuses on the experience using the machine in a professional video editor's daily workflow. Carter's conclusion is that the new 15-inch model he was using (he doesn't detail specs), is more than capable of handling daily editing in FCP X with 5K ProRes footage. He also notes that machine "tears strips off 'superior spec'd' Windows counterparts in the real world." Thomas Grove Carter writes: "First off, It's really fast. I've been using the MacBook Pro with the new version of FCP X and cutting 5k ProRes material all week, it's buttery smooth. No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off 'superior spec'd' Windows counterparts in the real world. This has always been true of Macs. If you're running software with old code which doesn't utilize the hardware well, you're not going to get great performance (as pointed out here)."

Comments

Yeah well

[fustakrakich]

I still want my MagSafe

Re:Yeah well

[fustakrakich]

That's the problem. I don't want to have to buy a bag full of adapters.

Re:Yeah well

[war4peace]

So... if it works for you, it works for everyone, or if it doesn't, they're dumb.

Can you work with an USB stick and a mouse at the same time?

Apple lover promotes Apple product

[Anonymous Coward]

News at 11

Re: Apple lover promotes Apple product

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's worse than that - it's purely speculative as he hasn't even used a Windows machine to make the comparison.

What Codec? What Bitrate?

[Anonymous Coward]

ProRes was designed to be a very easy on the CPU.

Is he using plain ProRes which is really designed just for HD, or ProRes 4444 or 4444XQ which will be much more demanding.

How does it perform with 5k RED or other RAW codecs?

FX Pro on apple....

[Anonymous Coward]

FX Pro is only available using a apple PC - so how can you compare it to windows???

Re:FX Pro on apple....

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that means his "full process" includes the fact that he already knows what he is doing on a mac, and he likes the workflow on a mac.

If you got me to test even something simple like image editing software on a mac vs a PC, I'd blow the shit out of anything using my PC, because I know the software and the workflow, I know the filesystem, I know the window system, I just know what I am doing.

On a mac; I'd get there; I wouldn't do it wrong, I just wouldn't know what I was doing half the time for stuff that is second nature to me on a windows machine. Hell I know all the windows keyboard shortcuts in the OS I just know what I am doing.

Does that mean Windows "tears strips off Mac" for whatever bullshit test I am running?

No, it means my workflow, my inputs, my required outputs have been tuned for whatever test I am running on one OS; and aren't on another.

His test is meaningless if its "My mac specific workflow tears strips off a potential windows specific workflow which I don't really like". Because they aren't comparable things.

Re:FX Pro on apple....

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been meaningful if he talked about Adobe Premiere instead. Adobe has equivalent video products for Mac and Windows (and, from personal and anecdotal and thus worthless experience, they beat the pants off of Final Cut Pro X). He could have benchmarked render times or even workflow times by comparing Adobe's products on Windows and Apple machines. He didn't.

Re:FX Pro on apple....

[Gussington]

You don't. If you watch the video (click on the "here" link at the end of the summary) he makes it clear that he's comparing time to get to an end result

TFA is about an unspecified spec MBP running better than an unspecified spec Win Laptop. TFA is a pure opinion piece which has no place in this forum. I'd be interested if it had hard numbers, and also did a comparison on performance vs cost, which is ultimately what counts most.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Windows one can be upgraded past 16gb of ram so not sure how that's going to work out for you....

um specs?

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

I actually went to read the article and expected a proper comparison with actual benchmarks. Instead, find a one liner as quoted in the summary. Come here and everyone says the obvious thing i missed with all the abbreviations: Final Cut Pro is a mac application.

Fuck this apple fanboi and his trolling!

shame on you slashdot for bothering to link it in the first place! *newsflash!* know-nothing nobody SAYS SOMETHING! stop the presses!

Re:SO?

[Dynedain]

Actually, it's less about having access to the underlying code (what MS was guilty of with Office), and more that they build to the APIs their OS provides.

Adobe has to build it's video editing products with an extra abstraction layer because they want the same application code to run on multiple platforms. The same premise applies when building something on GTK/Qt for cross-compatibility with Linux/Win/OSX, or when building something in Unity3D for iOS/Android cross platform support. That extra abstraction layer introduces overhead, and there's always performance-related features that you can't leverage because the functionality of the APIs underneath aren't 1:1.

If you only target a single hardware/OS platform, then you can focus on best using the APIs that platform provides.

Granted, there is some additional benefit for Apple's software teams because they get early access to what's coming and are pressured to actually use the new features that a 3rd party might be too conscious to implement.

Apple Reality Distortion Field (tm)

[thesupraman]

Just the usual ARFD effect.

'My computer, despite being slower in all measurable specifications, is FASTER! HA! AND I AM A PROFESSIONAL!'
Followed by turning of the back, fingers in ears, and reciting of 'nya nya nya nya I cannot hear you nya nya'

And in the real works, people keep on getting work done, knowing that in actual fact, the exact machine specs, OS, etc
have such a small effect on a persons productivity, that it is unimportant.

Not to mention that fact that if he really is doing such high grade video work, and is using ANY laptop, he just doesnt get it,
as a much more powerful desktop will be much MUCH more productive (for a start, it will have monitors where he can actually
see the video he is working on... RAID storage so a drive crash wont lose all his work, much more RAM to allow a decent video
buffer, and more cores, because video processing IS embarrassingly parallel and scales nearly perfectly).

So, basically a chump. example what the media loves for clickbait.

Re: Apple Reality Distortion Field (tm)

[chentiangemalc]

For video editing the software makes a huge difference as well. Is there anything for Windows or Linux with even remotely close performance to Final Cut Pro? I am yet to see it but open to suggestions, adobe premier is about 12x slower, whether run on Mac or Windows