4K question (proxy vs. non, etc.)

Hey everyone! Hoping the community can help me answer a small question:

We went to Australia for our anniversary. I didn't want to be bogged down with gear this time, so I bought a 3 axis gimbal for the iPhone and using some decent iPhone lenses, shot the whole trip in 4K on the iPhone 6S Plus. Surprisingly, the footage actually looks quite nice and the gimbal did an AWESOME job of stabilizing everything. So...

I want to edit the over 100 GB of footage and make a nice video. I want to edit in 4K and I have two machines in the house to choose from, which is part of the problem. My main machine is a MacPro 4,1 (Early 2009), 2x2.26 Quad Core Intel Xeon, with 32 GB RAM and the ATI Radeon HD 870 512 MB video card. It also has an SSD for the boot drive and n 8 TB internal RAID to edit off of.

The other machine is my MacBook Pro 12,1 (Early 2015), 3.1 Ghz Intel Core i7, with 16 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD.

Problem:

I loaded the footage into my MacPro and FCP gave me a warning that said I may not be able to edit 4K on this machine. I tried, and it seemed okay until I started trying to color correct, and then the whole screen froze and artifacted and I had to reboot.

I then plugged my laptop into my ASUS 27" monitor (it's a nice one), and had no problems editing on that machine other than the noise of the fans occasionally spinning up when rendering, etc.

MY QUESTIONS (and thanks for your patience!)

1) Should I create proxy media on my MacPro and edit the project there?

2) Should I forget the MacPro and use the MacBookPro laptop without proxy media?

3) If I use the MacBookPro laptop, should I edit from my 7200 RPM external Thunderbolt drive or off of the internal SSD in the laptop? Is there any advantage or disadvantage to either?

4) Besides buying a new mac... is there any other solution I am missing? I've thought about buying a better video card for the MacPro, but that seems like money wasted at this point in the computers life span.

Thank you so much!
Daniel Scherl
danielscherl@icloud.com

danielscherl wrote: ...I want to edit the over 100 GB of footage and make a nice video. I want to edit in 4K and I have two machines in the house to choose from...is there any other solution I am missing? I've thought about buying a better video card for the MacPro, but that seems like money wasted at this point in the computers life span....

Your 8-core 2009 Mac Pro actually has less Geekbench performance than your 2015 MBP. Also the Xeon CPU in the Mac Pro does not support Intel's Quick Sync, which is hardware-accelerated H264 encode/decode. Adding a GPU will not normally help this since a GPU cannot meaningfully accelerate H264 encode/decode, only effects.

Your options are transcode everything to proxy and work on the Mac Pro or edit on the MBP in camera-native 4k. Ultimately they will both produce 4k output.

IMO for large 4k projects, even on a top-spec 2015 iMac 27, FCPX is not fast enough for really smooth 4k editing. However this varies based on codec and screen resolution. OTOH it is usually fast enough to skim the content in the Event Browser and make your initial selects, then you can transcode to proxy and edit from there.

Since it is usually more comfortable editing on desktop machine than a laptop (even if using an external monitor), I'd suggest you first try transcoding to proxy (not optimized) on the Mac Pro and evaluating that performance. If that doesn't work use the MBP. Editing from the 500GB SSD is OK except you may run out of space. Large render files, temp files, etc. usually are generated in the library as you work. If it is too big you could try putting your media on the external HDD.

If using proxy remember to switch the viewer to proxy before editing, and switch the viewer back to optimized/original before exporting the timeline, otherwise it will export in proxy resolution.

I have a 2015 top-spec MBP and I don't like editing on it because it spins up the fans so much.

Awesome. Thank you so much! I tested both and as you said, using the laptop is the best. There's no problem or delay even stacking effects or color correction on the footage editing natively.

Here's hoping a nice, new MacPro gets released soon. Looks like it's time for an upgrade!

THANK YOU again!
Daniel