Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro X: First Impressions

The present and future of post production business and technology by| Philip Hodgetts

A loaner Mac Pro arrived from Apple on Friday afternoon. It’s a 12 core, dual D700 GPUs, 512 GB Flash storage and 32 GB of RAM. Here are my initial thoughts after three days.

The Mac Pro is beautiful. It’s really hard to describe the color because it changes. I think it will fit in with any decor because it takes on tones of what is around it. Rather hard to explain but rather beautiful. It is every bit as small as everyone says it is, although not terribly light!

It is damned quiet. With a Compressor Batch and Final Cut Pro X looping a 4K RED native timeline in the background we managed to push the CPU.

The Mac Pro’s noise level went from “I can’t hear it at all” to “I can just hear it if I lean right in and listen right next to it”. But of course, if the RAID was running, there’s now way of hearing the Mac Pro even under extreme load. This is a totally different experience of a heavy-iron Mac. read more...