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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)."
I still want my MagSafe
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
How fast is a strip and what happens when I tear it?
News at 11
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 is only available using a apple PC - so how can you compare it to windows???
The Windows one can be upgraded past 16gb of ram so not sure how that's going to work out for you....
This is expected to be this way when the hardware and the OS and the software are all from the same maker. They can and do write final cut to take total advantage of the OS as they have access to the underlying code. The same for the hardware as well. Windows 10 is a decent OS but it is not fancy GUI sitting on top of a highly tuned and targeted BSD distro. All things being equal hardware wise I would very much expect that Final cut pro would be at least 20% faster on the new MacBook pro.
Software designed for Apple works better on Apple hardware.
In other news, Microsoft Office works better on Windows than Mac OS.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
[...] the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off 'superior spec'd' Windows counterparts in the real world.
What? Is he trying to say that the new Macbook Pro hardware is good because FinalCutPro runs well on it?
Basically he said that a particular MacOS-only program has better performance than an-unnamed-but-presumably-similarly-functioned PC program.
apt captcha: distorts
The issue is, on windows, if we are not happy with the performance, we can tune it.
I am waiting for the disclaimer he was paid by apple in some way for the review.
I went on to buy a linux XPS 13, I've been quite happy with it. At least it has an SD card reader.
Windows programs can also make use if vector instructions and GPUs, "new" cide. So what software in Windows is he referring to? From what year? What machine is it tested on?
Benchmark scores for Final Cut Pro:
Macbook Pro: Greater than zero.
Windows PC: Zero.
Final Cut Pro runs better on Mac than on a PC. News at 11.
Even an old Mac from 5 years ago would "tears strips off 'superior spec'd' Windows counterparts in the real world" when running FC since FC doesn't run on Windows at all.
What a cool laptop.
Real video editors use Steenbecks.
A lot of fawning adulation here for a manufacturer that produces machines with many hardware shortcuts that in theory compete with Linux. Bring back the nerd Slashdot and get rid of the SF version, please.
Alternative Right.
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!
-
...try to buy a Windows PC that has sufficient PCI-Express lanes to run some NVMe SSD storage on top of a high-end video card and some a few USB 3 and ThunderBolt ports.
Hell, try to BUILD it. The motherboard manufacturers play jenga with individual models and what ports are where, so even though there's a PC Standard it takes hours of research to build a system that doesn't have random bottlenecks if you're going to be doing massive-media manipulation like video editing.
So does the new MacBook tromp most Windows PCs you can buy or build? You betcha it can, that's no surprise at all. Even those with significantly higher spec 'parts' when the underlying motherboard cripples everything so it can't live up to those specs.
- WolfWings
Terrible review
1) "its fast" dur no one said it wasnt
2) "he has usb-c SSDs" wow go you
3) "dongles arent a problem as i use the laptop in a desktop setting anyway and will be buying a thunderbolt dock for the desk" AWESOME man thats great that youve removed the laptops killer feature, portability, to accessorise
4) "everyone that isnt as enlightened as the reviewer sucks" thanks for telling us we arent as good as you because this generation of MBP doesnt work for our needs
jesus
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
The intervals might be fast enough. But you need a lot of terabytes of storage to do editing with FCP
X. Those Apple ProRes files takes up 5x the space of the video you import. Then it saves all the renders it has made so if you adjusted fx color, you have how it looked before the change and after. And for every thing you change to a clip a version is saved if I had time to render it in the background.
My uncle tells me anecdotal evidence is the best evidence!
Do many Cameras support airdrop? PC to PC transfer is not why most people use SD cards (they use USB drives), SD cards are used because many portable recording devices - older ones in particular AFAIK use SD cards.
Why the hell would anyone fuss with Airdrop? All you're doing is a file copy, OSes can do that on their own. No extra layer of complication required.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The MBP with FCP still does not hold a candle to Avid's Media Composer and associated hardware solutions.
Apple is the company that requires you to use iTunes to copy music files to their MP3 player.
In other news, this 'pro' uses a laptop as his primary work device...? Do people actually use laptops for more than youtube, email and documents? Seems horribly inefficient.
Maybe I'm just old. I'm gonna go hug my workstation.
If Airdrop works they're probably gonna shove an incompatible Airdrop2 up your ass soon and you'll be back here saying how much better it is.
lucm, indeed.
Shouldn't be necessary - the nicest feature I've seen in prosumer/low-end professional cameras are dual/quad (or more) slots for cards (compact flash or P2). Card #1 fills up, recording switches to card #2, you extract card #1, dump the contents, and put it back in the camera. You can keep recording until your external storage fills up - laptop, desktop, external HDD, whatever.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Apple still doesn't have ANYTHING that even comes close to CUDA support and it's been what, like 10 years? I remember when Apple threw up the brick wall to Nvidia then when they invented CUDA, sued them for not making it run on Apple. Ever since the invention of CUDA, Apple is a joke for editing videos. Open CL is a joke. The lack of hardware controls is a joke. Here, you want an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended)? Take however much that overhyped piece of shit costs then build a custom PC for that amount of money and then we'll see what's faster. It'd probably have RAIDed SSDs, M2 SSDs, and a 32GB RAM drive with 32GB usable RAM.
Typing this on my low voltage intel windows laptop with 3 4k screens. (Yeah I got usb-3).
So thats 12k of pixels vs his 5k of pixels on a lower spec'd laptop.
Window is so efficient!
Also, not understanding anything and being adulated for it seems to be a thing lately.
When it comes to the work I do, graphics to a certain extent and Audio Processing to a large extent, the contemporary Apple OS machines always out-performed the contemporary Windows OS machines at any time since I began ... 1990, if you measure it in terms of work done on the file ... how long does it take to get x amount of final output?
It's the combination of OS and hardware configuration. You can build a similar Windows box, but it still lags in output over, say, a week. Also note that when Jobs built Pixar, he didn't use Macs to render his movies, he used x86 boxes.
But, he also didn't use Windows; back in the day (before the Disney buyout) Pixar built proprietary Linux applications to process their film stock. So it really IS the OS.
In video editing, that's the key. The new MBPs have the fastest bulk storage systems anyone's shipped in a portable yet.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
WTF are you talking about?
You do know that the Mac uses exactly the same CPU and chipsets that you can get in equivalent PCs right?
You do know that it is Intel that sets exactly how many PCI-Express ports are available to that, because it is PART OF THE CPU, right?
You do know that there is absolutely NO special hardware in Macs, or special setup, EXCEPT a boot and video bios specifically created
by Apple to block normal drivers from accessing them (and, because of that, meaning that driver updates are much MUCH slower), right?
So no, you are just making shit up I am afraid. It is very easy to purchase both a Windows Laptop and Desktop that makes exactly as
good use of its internal setup as a mac, because its all basically standard.
You will of course try and point to some POS HP $400 laptop and say 'see! it is badly setup!'. that is market separation, and which it
sucks, it is why they are willing to sell that for you for $400.
So, basically grow up, learn a few actual facts, and stop trying to claim 'secret sauce!' to rationalise your personal spending habits.
This says it all about how awesome the Macbook pro and apple are for any use whatsoever, which of course includes video striping:
https://youtu.be/-XSC_UG5_kU
E
I am surprised that nobody has mentioned cost until now.
The fact that windows is the standard in business, and government, is another huge factor. Uprooting your windows infrastructure, and replace it with apple would be a huge endeavor. Everybody would have to retrained, you would have to buy all new applications, and so on.
Once again, a Mac fanboy runs with a line that the "software and hardware are so closely tied together". Bull...the only difference between the hardware in a Mac and in a cheap Dell is that the Mac hardware is more reliable and is more consistent across the model. A business-line Dell, on the other hand, has the same QA going into the component selection, and, therefore, works just as well and reliably as the Mac. And still at the same or better price. The software companies have no more access to the OSX source code than they do to the Windows source code, meaning they can't really dig more into the hardware in either case. Nor would they.....they have features in their backlog to roll out....not just minuscule performance improvements.
n/t
Right, you dump the contents... using the SD slot the MacBook Pro doesn't have. Thus the need for the adapter your grandparent post mentioned.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Now we see the true genius of Jobs repeating this over and over again long ago when it definitely wasn't true. This was back in the "never Intel" phase of Job's reality distortion field.
It would be slightly closer to the truth to say that Intel CPUs have "always" been faster. There were exceptions from high-end competitors (not many from the Motorola camp), and a short appearance by AMD in the cat bird seat with their Opteron, before the black curtain drop of all time at the introduction of Intel's first CoreDuo.
RISC cores often managed to steal a march over Intel on peak sustained instruction issue width / instruction retirement width. Typically in RISC you would see 4-wide issue and retirement with shallow OoO (out of order), against 3-wide for Intel with deep OoO. RISC was also first to adopt fused multiply-add, which really showed up in select Photoshop filters (boy did Jobs ever notice that peak on that graph). This was before these algorithms were delegated to the GPU at orders of magnitude speed increase.
The thing about OoO is that it extends full stack: from CPU, through memory cache, SMP coherence, right through to the memory bus protocol (split transactions, with a deep tag queue, pretty please).
Intel wasn't trying to beat Apple on graphics professional benchmarks at this point in their history. They were trying to gain an entry point into the server room, which lead to an entry point into the cloud, which lead to damn near ownership of the entire cloud space. What a horrible plan. Meanwhile, back at the graphics professional hipster coral, the best x86 system design could still hang with PowerPC, and typically prevail on the most complex graphics workflows.
Deep OoO is hard, and vastly more important to server workloads than 4-wide peak issue and retirement. Sorry, Photoshop, some filters need not apply. All the hardest Photoshop stuff was destined to wind up on the GPU anyway, excluding mainly those parts were memory agility was a key performance attribute.
Intel's server-workload memory agility pretty much kicked the pants off of everything else, all the time. The one exception that I'm aware of it when the Opteron beat Intel by a generation to the on-chip DRAM controller. This, combined with a snappy SMP fabric for 2 and 4 sockets, caused Intel to really see the light for a couple of tense years.
The only time Motorola got anywhere near top dog status was their early 4-wide FMA designs, which only held up for predictable patterns of memory access. Photoshop was a dream marriage during this era of PowerPC's singular design win.
At this point, I've kind of won this debate, because Jobs is dead, and I'm not. He lapped me a hundred times in repeating his side of the story in the early days, but time is on my side, and god willing, I should surpass him yet.
If you go to FinalCut Prop website, the reviewer mentioned in the post and his company are featured in their splash page ad: http://www.apple.com/final-cut...
... "Slashvertisement"
There has to be a way for Airdrop to confirm that someone didn't break into my wireless network, name their mac the same as mine, and sit there ready to accept my file, so there has to be some set up. Either Airdrop is an unnecessary layer of authentication or it is avoiding authentication altogether which is probably a bigger problem.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Come now boys, let's all get along and plug the Thunderbolt cables from the Lenovo into the macbook...and.....wait a minute...it didnt explode?