Drew Lahat
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- Mar 12, 2012
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For technical and professional reasons, the time is coming for me to get a new(er) laptop than my aging 2010 i5 MBP. My needs these days range from color grading to on-set data wrangling. I don't need "the best system"; I'd peg my goal at grading Epic/Dragon RAW at half-rez, 1/2 good debayer for 1080p real-time output. If NR slows me down, I'd live.
It seems that trying to get a (Mac) laptop to do both tasks is a bad idea. Even if I splurged $2,500 for the latest and greatest Macbook Pro, that gets me an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of VRAM which - correct me if I'm wrong - is still rather mediocre for the grading needs. Not to mention this machine is completely un-upgradable, from the RAM to the glued-together battery.
I consider getting a used Mid-2012, top-config MBP which offers a lot of bang for the buck. For ~$1,300 you get 2.7GHz quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, Thunderbolt, USB3, and an nVidia GT650M w/ 384 CUDA cores & 1GB VRAM (same # of GPU cores as the best 2014 MBP). It's also more serviceable. (Can you tell I don't care for Retina?
The money I save will be used down the road for a grading system with a purpose-built hackintosh desktop, proper monitor, etc.
The question is, for now, what could (and what shouldn't) I expect from that 2012 MBP for Resolve grading?
Could I achieve the above needs at 24fps? At 12fps? At 1/4 rez? HD proxies? Ideally I'd love to hear from anyone who personally tried a similar config. If you've tried it and it's sh*t I'd love to know, but when people theorize, the answer is all too often a blanket "get more, more more", sometimes w/ overkill.
Related questions I ponder about:
PS In Resolve/RED hardware discussions, the GPU gets much, much more attention than the CPU. However according to the Resolve manual, it "decodes R3D files using multi-core CPU processing" (pg. 180). If it's true, Red footage being raw should have no bearing on GPU needs. I'd expect the GPU load for grading half-rez R3D to be (only) 75% more demanding than grading HD, crunching 3.5 Mpixels per frame vs. HD's 2MP.
It seems that trying to get a (Mac) laptop to do both tasks is a bad idea. Even if I splurged $2,500 for the latest and greatest Macbook Pro, that gets me an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of VRAM which - correct me if I'm wrong - is still rather mediocre for the grading needs. Not to mention this machine is completely un-upgradable, from the RAM to the glued-together battery.
I consider getting a used Mid-2012, top-config MBP which offers a lot of bang for the buck. For ~$1,300 you get 2.7GHz quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, Thunderbolt, USB3, and an nVidia GT650M w/ 384 CUDA cores & 1GB VRAM (same # of GPU cores as the best 2014 MBP). It's also more serviceable. (Can you tell I don't care for Retina?
The money I save will be used down the road for a grading system with a purpose-built hackintosh desktop, proper monitor, etc.
The question is, for now, what could (and what shouldn't) I expect from that 2012 MBP for Resolve grading?
Could I achieve the above needs at 24fps? At 12fps? At 1/4 rez? HD proxies? Ideally I'd love to hear from anyone who personally tried a similar config. If you've tried it and it's sh*t I'd love to know, but when people theorize, the answer is all too often a blanket "get more, more more", sometimes w/ overkill.
Related questions I ponder about:
- Will the Thunderbolt1 port be able to carry fast storage I/O, a Blackmagic Mini Monitor, and a WUXGA GUI display? (Short answer, after spending 2 hours reading TB tech info: it actually should.)
- What happens to the GT650M when it has to both drive Resolve computes and the external GUI display. Has anyone tried a USB3.0 GPU adapter for a GUI display, or I'm going too crazy here?
PS In Resolve/RED hardware discussions, the GPU gets much, much more attention than the CPU. However according to the Resolve manual, it "decodes R3D files using multi-core CPU processing" (pg. 180). If it's true, Red footage being raw should have no bearing on GPU needs. I'd expect the GPU load for grading half-rez R3D to be (only) 75% more demanding than grading HD, crunching 3.5 Mpixels per frame vs. HD's 2MP.