Video Editors Choose Dell for Performance over Apple Mac Pro

Over the last two years, I’ve worked on numerous heavy, professional-grade video editing projects like live streaming Lollapalooza, ACL Fest and JazzFest music festivals. A project like a music festival is a tremendously demanding beast as the timelines are extremely tight, as little as a few hours, but the quality of the final product must still be as high as a full blown production. This is why having a fast, high quality production cycle is critical to success and why video editors demand robust, dependable hardware (and lots of caffeine). For projects like these I’ve seen many different video editing platforms including Apple Macs and Dell Precision workstations. I’ve always had the impression that the Dell workstations were faster but was glad to see Dell hire an independent third party, Principled Technologies, to test the systems head-to-head using real world video editing scenarios.

The methodology was simple – get the most powerfully configured Apple Mac Pro and Dell Precision™ T7600 with Intel® Xeon® processors you can for $12,500 per system and run real-world video editing tests using Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5.5 software. Configuration, pricing, and warranty information came from Dell.com and Apple.com as of August 14, 2012. The results showed the Dell Precision T7600, featuring Intel® Xeon® processors, outperformed Apple Mac Pro by up to 96.5% on video production tasks and is up to 28 times faster than the Mac Pro! For example, to render an entire work area for an AVCHD four-layer video, the Dell Precision T7600 with an Intel® Xeon® processor took only 13 seconds to do what it took the Apple Mac Pro more than 6 minutes to accomplish. But this wasn’t some fluke test. The average time saved, incorporating every single test that was run, was 79 percent! Can you even imagine if you had that kind of time back in your day? It even amazes me and I’ve been working on Dell Precision workstations with Intel® Xeon® processors for the past two years. If you do heavy video editing you could literally be wasting your day by working on a Mac Pro. And don’t forget, you get all that power at the same cost!