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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

The new Macbook Pro´s

Mathias Erichsen

Mathias Erichsen

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How good do you guys think these laptops are?

I´m considering selling my 2008 Mac Pro and getting a new 17" as a replacement... Love the idea of being totaly mobile.
I´ll use my Eizo 24" LCD ColorEdge as reference monitor in my office.

I´m primarely cutting and grading Red footage for commercials and music videos in CS5 :001_smile:
 
Without actually getting hands on one yet - I'd say they're a goodly sized step in the right direction. Thunderbolt promises desktop-like peripheral performance in a laptop. Cool.
 
I'd say it depends a great deal on how you use your Mac Pro and how you intend to work going forward.

In terms of pure CPU speed the 2011 MacBook Pro is certainly a match for any quad core Mac Pro up to even the 2009 editions...

but computer performance comprises so much more than CPU speed.

The old 2008 Mac Pro has much faster PCIe interfaces, can support more Thunderbolt ports, etc ,etc. That doesn't include having 4 3.5" SATA drive bays and 2 5.25" SATA bays.

My personal expectation is that I will purchase a 2011 MacBook Pro to replace my dual G5 PowerMac as my all purpose "personal computer"

Because of Thunderbolt it can serve as a light to medium duty DIT workstation.

I also expect to use an iPad 2 to replace most of my truly mobile computing needs- and quite probably a lot of personal communication needs. (i.e. primary email, skype, Facetime etc) in conjunction with an iPhone 5

I will continue using my 2010 Mac Pro, it will get upgraded a few times. I expect a 2 port x4 Thunderbolt card to become available very soon, and I'll replace the ATI dual slot GPU. (Depending on what the next Final Cut Studio looks like, I may just get a very fast GPU and a Rocket- or I may have to get two fast GPU's and Resolve.)

I expect to have need for at least two more iterations of powerful desktop workstations. I'm guessing a 2012 Mac Pro, I'm actually looking for PCIe 3.0 as a trigger technology. After that I'm guessing a 2014-2015 Mac Pro... or whatever they are called by then)

That's an abbreviated peek into my thinking.

I'd probably steer away from using MacBook Pro as the primary working computer if you work in this industry for the foreseeable future.
 
It will be interesting to see how long it will be before someone makes a Thunderbolt solution for a RED Rocket card laptop type case. This solves a lot of the issues about using a laptop in the field for editing R3D's.

I am so glad I have held on before purchasing a new MacBook Pro, they keep getting better and the price seems to be the same. My old 17" has serious screen problems and it has to be plugged into an external monitor. I just couldn't see spending $1600 on getting the screen replaced.
 
Alexander Ibrahim said:
I expect a 2 port x4 Thunderbolt card to become available very soon ...
Click to expand...

In doing a little homework, Intel says that the Thunderbolt chipset must be placed on the motherboard, because it requires access to both the PCIe bus and the graphics display subsystem.

It strikes me however that you could readily place a Thunderbolt chipset on a graphics card instead of the motherboard in a typical PC/Mac Pro.

It would have access to PCIe and the GPU there.

The downside to such a solution is that it may constrain bandwidth for either the graphics or data application- perhaps both.

Still ... it should work.
 
One thing that bears mentioning, since this is the Adobe forum, is that the new MBP has an *ATI* GPU. Which means Mercury won't work, since it's specific to Nvidia GPUs.

This also probably means that any new-generation iMacs and Mac Pros won't work with Mercury, since Apple tends to stick with one GPU manufacturer across the whole line. Look for ATI cards in the next Mac Pro update and a lot of displeased Adobe users.
 
Ben Brainerd said:
One thing that bears mentioning, since this is the Adobe forum, is that the new MBP has an *ATI* GPU. Which means Mercury won't work, since it's specific to Nvidia GPUs.
Click to expand...

Mercury is more than just GPU acceleration. In fact, most of the playback engine is still entirely CPU-driven. I don't have benchmarks yet, but will soon. I just ordered one of the new MBP's. I'm betting that overall performance in Premiere CS5 will be faster on the new quad-core CPU with ATI than it is on the previous dual-core i7 with mediocre GeForce 330M. People keep focusing on GPU this and GPU that and don't actually look under the hood as to what is going on and what the GPU actually accelerates. Outside of Premiere, nothing in the Adobe suite is GPU accelerated at all anyway.

This also probably means that any new-generation iMacs and Mac Pros won't work with Mercury, since Apple tends to stick with one GPU manufacturer across the whole line. Look for ATI cards in the next Mac Pro update and a lot of displeased Adobe users.
Click to expand...

They can always buy a Quadro 4000 if they feel they absolutely need CUDA. I just bought a few for a new Resolve box. Prices are getting very reasonable since PNY slashed the list price to match the PC version.

That aside, the 2010 12-core Mac Pro (2.93GHz w/24GB) with ATI 5870 outperforms my '09 8-core (2.93GHz w/24GB) and GTX285 in Premiere. It smokes the '09 system. Yes it doesn't benefit from the CUDA for GPU-accelerated FX, but that's a small loss when the playback of R3D and H264 rips right along (those tasks are multithreaded, not GPU accelerated). In this new 12-core box, just arrived friday afternoon and is part of the new Resolve system, I'm really questioning the need for a RED Rocket. REDCINE-X obviously still needs the Rocket as it's not multithreaded like old REDCINE was (yet, anyway). But I can generate dailies from Premiere or Resolve just as fast without the Rocket on this box. Makes one rethink our current slot deprived state...
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Mercury is more than just GPU acceleration. In fact, most of the playback engine is still entirely CPU-driven. I don't have benchmarks yet, but will soon. I just ordered one of the new MBP's. I'm betting that overall performance in Premiere CS5 will be faster on the new quad-core CPU with ATI than it is on the previous dual-core i7 with mediocre GeForce 330M. People keep focusing on GPU this and GPU that and don't actually look under the hood as to what is going on and what the GPU actually accelerates. Outside of Premiere, nothing in the Adobe suite is GPU accelerated at all anyway.
Click to expand...

I'll admit that I didn't know that. Most of my Adobe work these days is bouncing XML through Premiere on the way to After Effects. I hadn't taken it the extra step to consider that the raw CPU power would make up for any GPU losses.
 
... max 8GB Ram for the new MBP? I thought AE & PPro CS5 needs much more than that. In the adobe forum one of their tech guys recommended 4GB per virtual core ...
 
I wrote a question in "apple workflow", but no one seems to answer, this discussion seems to be more on going though, coypaste it here...

-Has anyone done some "on the field" benchmarking of the new macbooks?
How high in quality postproduction can be done? With Thunderbolt you are able to throughput quite a high data rate, but what is the processing power, the 8gb ram and intel/amd graphics able to do together with the thunderbolt connection?

Can we edit uncompressed HD in a fluid way? Or can we get higher, maybe 2K, 4K?
 
Here's a clip that shows 4 uncompressed HD streams playing back simultaneously on a new MBP with a Promise RAID pushing 700MB/s over Thunderbolt and then into a Cinema Display also over Thunderbolt. The benchmarks suggest these new machines are as fast as the early 2008 8-core MacPros. Absolutely fast enough for high-end post pro.

http://fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/21...ressed-hd-on-the-15q-in-fcp-peaking-at-600mbs
 
So, I would be able to do offline editing in let's say Avid, then online editing in either Premiere or FCP, playing uncompressed (blackmagic) 1080 25p 10-bit through the thunderbolt with a RAID setup and my MXO2 mini as video monitoring 10-bit to a grading screen like the HP DreamColor display?

If so, that's enough for me ^^
 
Christoffer Glans said:
So, I would be able to do offline editing in let's say Avid, then online editing in either Premiere or FCP, playing uncompressed (blackmagic) 1080 25p 10-bit through the thunderbolt with a RAID setup and my MXO2 mini as video monitoring 10-bit to a grading screen like the HP DreamColor display?

If so, that's enough for me ^^
Click to expand...

Jepp! If this is the case, I´m with you! That´s enough :001_smile:
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
That aside, the 2010 12-core Mac Pro (2.93GHz w/24GB) with ATI 5870 outperforms my '09 8-core (2.93GHz w/24GB) and GTX285 in Premiere. It smokes the '09 system. Yes it doesn't benefit from the CUDA for GPU-accelerated FX, but that's a small loss when the playback of R3D and H264 rips right along (those tasks are multithreaded, not GPU accelerated). In this new 12-core box, just arrived friday afternoon and is part of the new Resolve system, I'm really questioning the need for a RED Rocket. REDCINE-X obviously still needs the Rocket as it's not multithreaded like old REDCINE was (yet, anyway). But I can generate dailies from Premiere or Resolve just as fast without the Rocket on this box. Makes one rethink our current slot deprived state...
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

Can you list out the specs of your new 12-core Mac Pro for Resolve? I'm in the market and no one knows more about this than you do. I know you thought it through.

-michael zaletel
 
adam r said:
The new Macbook Pros now take 16 GB Ram! The Ram is too expensive, but its got to come down in price soon when other manufacturers jump on board:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1112437


:smile5:
Click to expand...

Is this official? That it has support for 16gb? What I hear is that while it can be installed with 16gb of memory it doesn't use more then 8gb, so you loose 8gb that is just in there, not used.
 
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