What Post Production Software Works Best on the Mac Pro?

Premiumbeat by Jonny Elwyn

The new Mac Pro offers powerful performance, but which video editing applications are best suited for the system?

Two of the main benefits of those cores packed into the new Mac Pro is the ability to split (thread) parts of high performance tasks to each core, therefore getting the job done faster, and sending computational instructions to the two GPU’s that ship with each Mac Pro configuration.

But as the Mac Pro is new, there aren’t a load of software applications that are ready to do that multi-threading work. So what software works best on the new Mac Pro?

Final Cut Pro X on the Mac Pro

As FCPX 10.1 is obviously Apple’s own product, it works extremely well on Apple’s own hardware. FCP.co posted this report on their first 24 hours with the new Mac Pro and had this to say about the performance in FCPX:

For the purposes of testing, I decided I’d try and see what I could do in real time. I took a quick trip into FCP’s preferences, disabled the background rendering function and enabled the dropped frames warning. Next, I switched the Viewer’s menu from the default “Best Performance” option to “Best Quality”. With these settings in place, skimming and playback was very responsive, with the exception of the 4K RED RAW footage which dropped frames on playback (though skimming was absolutely fine).

Barefeats.com did their own FCPX and MacPro test and posted these results. Interestingly in these Mac Pro benchmarks the 6-core D500 configuration beat out the 12-core D700 config. read more...