Recommended new Mac?

I need a new Mac. Currently using Macbook Pro (mid 2012) with 16GB RAM.

It occasionally quits on me and I think FCPX is running slow when adding effects. Specially to 4K clips.

So, to get a proper graphic card, I think it's best going for an iMac. But which one?

Is the iMac MK442 a good choice, or is it not far from the MBP I'm having? Should I consider the MK452? How much better than the MK442? Should I go for the 27" MK462 instead? Is the graphic card much better then MK452?

Hi! I don't know what your budget is, but I would go with any of the NEW 27" 5K iMac.
Be sure to get the new ones because they come with a Skylake processor. The new 21" don't, they come with an old technology (Haswell processors). Also a good option would be to get at least the 2TB fusion drive because it has a 128 GB Flash memory and a 7200 RPM drive, the 1TB Fusion Drive only comes with 24GB of flash memory and a 5400RPM drive. And if you can get a i7 chip instead of an i5 you will be flying in FCPX. BTW, you can buy RAM at MacSales for a much better price than Apple offers.

You can find a lot of information at barefeats.com

Hope it helps!

PS: I'm about to buy a 27" 5K iMac with a 4 Ghz i7 with 16Gb of RAM, 2TB Fusion Drive and AMD Radeon R9 M395 with 2GB video memory.

Thank you for your quick respons!

My budget was $1200, but considering the Skylake I must rethink and go for this one: www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MK462LL/A&step=config

Can't find any info about Skylake on this machine. How can I know for sure this one has it?

And how much faster is the 3.2Ghz compared to MBP 2.5Ghz with Intel HD graphic 4000?

What does "FCPX aged film effect render" mean?
barefeats.com/imac5k16.html
Does it take xx seconds to render one clip?

The 'aged film' effect is one of FCPXs built in effects that people use for a benchmark because it is resource intensive.
it involves color adjustment, blur, adding grain, and overlaying dust/scratches.

what people will do is apply it to a clip of a predetermined length and time how long it takes to render.

hope this helps,
Mark

Thank you very much!

I wonder how many or how long the clip(s) in that test is. 40 seconds is quite some time for rendering one clip.

...

What would people recommend if you're talking about a laptop?

Like Neguah I'm now using a 2012-ish MBP, and one with far less RAM,
so I have to be very patient and take long coffee breaks, particularly when I render my brilliant old tapes in NEAT!.

lol

But since I have so goddawful many hours of old tapes that should be denoised, then I'm in the mood for buying myself a Xmas present to speed things up. What's fastest for FCPX and NEAT in the way of laptops instead of desktops?

sorry for phrasing rude, but all these Ghz-, bus-speed- and GPU-comparisons are nonsense to me.

Only 'true' measurement of speed is Alex' BruceX real life test, here at fcp.co
www.fcp.co/forum/hardware/18250-brucex-t...-cut-pro-x-benchmark

A benchmark test tests benchmark performance.
And as we all know, FCPX is highly integrated into OS and Apple hardware as no other NLE. So, what does some artificial number tells me...?

By 'numbers', my ol' Tupperware box (MacMini late2012) is a pocket-calculator; but I'm editing 4k, multicam, whatever.... real-time, stutter free .... reminds me 'bout bumble-bees, which cannot fly. According to aerodynamics engineers ...

Benchmarks? HA!!


PS: bumble-bees indeed don't fly, they swim thru air .....technically ...

Blackburn wrote: ... many hours of old tapes that should be denoised, then I'm in the mood for buying myself a Xmas present to speed things up. What's fastest for FCPX and NEAT in the way of laptops instead of desktops?

NEAT video denoising can be a problem performance wise if they don't support your specific GPU. It is a good quality product but it has limited and inconsistent support for GPU acceleration. E.g, it doesn't currently work on 2015 iMac with M395X. This support is planned for the future it as of today it doesn't work.

This makes NEAT run in CPU-only mode which can be slow, especially on 4k. However my limited tests (see below) show the GPU mode isn't that great, either. Before you commit to using NEAT it is important to try the eval version and assess whether they support your GPU. This is easy to do: download, install, add NEAT to a clip, open the NEAT interface from the inspector, select Tools>Preferences>Performance and note the GPU pane. You can press the GPU Troubleshooting button and it will indicate the status.

By contrast the less-expensive Photon Pro more consistently uses the GPU and is vastly faster: www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1490-p...-for-final-cut-pro-x

That said, I have run tests with NEAT video 4.09 on the below platforms and (at least on the top-spec 2015 MBP with R9 M370X) the GPU benefit seems limited or even negative. Note in the below tests NEAT can be configured to use GPU only, CPU only, or CPU+GPU (on supported platforms).

Render 8 seconds of UHD 4K from DJI Inspire, 24 fps, FCP X 10.2.2:

2015 MPB 2.8Ghz i7 16GB, 1TB SSD, R9 M370X, CPU only: 3:16
2015 MPB 2.8Ghz i7 16GB, 1TB SSD, R9 M370X, GPU only: 5:22
2015 MPB 2.8Ghz i7 16GB, 1TB SSD, R9 M370X, CPU+GPU: 3:27
2015 iMac 27, 4Ghz i7-6700K, 32MB, 1TB SSD, R9 M395X, CPU only: 2:53

Render same 8 sec on 2015 iMac 27 using Photon Pro NR: 6.4 seconds

Karsten:

That tread is really good! It so much better than reading number. Actual seconds is way more valuable. Thank you for that heads up!

Thanks, Joema. Your times when working on 4k material are much faster than what my aging machine manages on the lower resolution stuff which I'm primarily wanting to clean up, so my rough impression is that a newer i7 with more RAM will end my impatience with rendering times.

I've got Neat pro already, and applying it to everything in my old recordings is a temptation I currently have to resist. lol. Until I buy a faster machine I'm just applying it to moments here and there to enjoy how much better the old videos then become.

What are the advantages to choosing CPU+GPU if that a little slower than CPU alone?

Actually Blackburn - as much as I love macs and FCP, there are some things which windows PCs are a better choice, and if its specifically for denoising with neat then you may be far better off spending a fraction of the budget on pc with a hulking graphics card and a fast i7 processor . Your 2012 macbook pro is probably still a great editing machine with fcp (my 2010 macbook pro is).

You could edit in fcp and denoise on the PC in neat standalone. The disadvantage is transferring things back and forth but if your doing a lot of demonising the time spent in this step will be gained back in faster render times, and not logging up your macbook.

Blackburn wrote: ....What are the advantages to choosing CPU+GPU if that a little slower than CPU alone?

They may have done testing which yielded some improvement on certain platforms. There is a wide range of CPUs and GPUs, plus NEAT supports both OpenCL and CUDA so the number of permutations is high. Since they don't know what platform you're running on, they probably just provide those as standard options.

Normally you'd expect GPU-assisted rendering to be faster but in the above case it's not. Before doing a lot of work it might be worth inspecting a few smaller clips rendered each way to see if there are any quality differences.