Apple iMac Pro Delivers Pro Specs for Video Editing

If you are scoping out computers powerful enough for your video editing needs, you'll want to take a look at this article reposted from Videomaker. It's packed full of useful information. Even you aren't interested in an iMac, you'll gain some useful info on what works and what doesn't in choosing a new workstation. Take a look: From Videomaker.com

....Unlike the MacBook Pro before it, the iMac Pro was designed with feedback from creative professionals that they need ports other than just Thunderbolt 3. We connected both a G-Technology Shuttle T3 and a Shuttle XL T2 using an adapter. The speed was as fast as the Shuttle would offer, and the speeds were still respectable from the Shuttle XL using a T3 to T2 adapter.

Faster yet was the speed of the internal drives. We did a speed test on the OS drive using AJA Speed Test, moving a 64GB 5K ProRes 4444 file, and we saw 3035 MB/s write and 2561 MB/s read speeds.

Next, we used both Geekbench and Cinebench R15 to benchmark the review system. On Geekbench it has a multi-core score of 36,078. To put that in to perspective, a Xeon W-2170B at 2.5 GHz and 14 cores scored 40,456. That’s the only published result of a chip that out-scored this one. We tested both OpenGL and CPU on Cinebench R15.

The OpenGL score was 135.64 while, for comparison, a Quadro K4000M scored a 67.71. Next, the CPU test gave us a score of 2,054. Compare that to the 12-core 2.66GHz Xeon chip which scored 1,279.

To get some more real-world, video-editing numbers, we put it up against the machine the iMac Pro replaced: the Mac Pro complete with a 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon E5 CPU, 64GB of RAM and a Dual AMD FirePro D700 6GB. For fun, we also put this machine up against the previous iMac Pro with a 4.2GHz i7, 32GB of RAM and a Radeon Pro 580 8GB.

We rendered two projects, one using Adobe Premiere CC and the other After Effects. The project in Premiere is a one minute video using UHD 4K MP4s at 150 Mbps with simple cuts, grading and four tracks of audio. The After Effects project is a full motion graphic video with lots of layers, comps and effects. There are no project assets; everything was made from color mattes.

When using Premiere, the iMac Pro had the fastest render of one minute and 59 seconds. Second, was the Mac Pro at two minutes and 26 seconds and last was the older iMac Pro at two minutes and 46 seconds. That means the new iMac Pro is 29 percent faster than the Mac Pro and 19 percent faster than the older iMac Pro when doing this type of work.

In After Effects, the new iMac Pro finished in 30 seconds, the older iMac Pro in one minute and eight seconds and the Mac Pro in one minute 48 seconds. Again, the iMac Pro came out on top while this time, the older iMac Pro came in second and the Mac Pro third. That makes the iMac Pro 56 percent faster than the older iMac Pro and 73 percent faster than the Mac Pro....read more