Pp cs5.5 mbp

[Andy Solaini]

I keep hearing things about it's not a good idea to get a 2011 Macbook Pro to run Premiere Pro. Is it really THAT bad?
I am not a big time producer at the moment so my requirements are not anywhere near what some of you would require. My Core 2 Due is running PP CS5.5 fairly ok so I am I right in thinking a MBP won't be worse than that?

Andy S

[Randall Leong]

It depends on the video material that you intend to work with. As a general rule, AVCHD demands a much more robust system than HDV or Standard Definition (SD) video.

Also, none of the current MBPs are available with an Nvidia GPU at all: Every single MBP configuration is available with an AMD/ATi GPU or only integrated Intel HD graphics, neither of which is supported at all in the Mercury Playback Engine's (MPE's) GPU-accelerated mode (which supports only Nvidia CUDA GPUs). That forces CS5.5 to be "permanently" locked in MPE's software-only mode, which may result in rendering times that are up to 20 times slower than with GPU acceleration.

Furthermore, none of the MBP's can accomodate even two fast internal hard drives: All of the MBP's have room for only one single hard drive for absolutely everything. That severely slows down the performance of Premiere Pro or any other video editing program. Worse, the Thunderbolt ports are currently useless because there are no Thunderbolt external hard drives on the market right now, resulting in only USB 2.0 ports and Firewire 800 ports being available for external hard drives. Both of those types of connections are significantly slower than the average sequential internal transfer speed of most of today's hard drives.

[Bill Pryor]

There are some Thunderbolt drives available. First Thunderbolt products already available from LaCie and Promise | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence

I used the 17" MacBook Pro, early 2008 version, for FCP until it died recently and I got an 8 core tower. I transcoded all my H.264 from the 5DII to ProRes422 and it edited that fine. It never would play H.264 worth a damn, and render times were slow. I had 4 firewire drives and got an eSata adapter for two 2 gig eSata drives from the Express card port. Rendering was slow but it was OK for editing. I think the above post is correct in that you couldn't use the Mercury engine, but I don't think the top of the line fully pimped out MacBook Pro would be worse than what you're using. However that's just an educated guess. You might look around in the Adobe users groups and see if anybody else is doing it.

When I got my setup in 2008, I had a good reason for going with the big MacBook pro. But unless you need a laptop and don't want to spend the money for two computers, I wouldn't advise going that route. As I said, mine worked, but it worked better when I was shooting HDV. After switching to H.264 everything took longer, and all the transcoding was a lot longer than now with the 8 core. (I'm looking forward to my complete move to PP so I don't have to transcode anymore).

[David Beisner]

We've got a user right now who we've been working with over on the Adobe forum who has had a serious crashing problem with PrPro CS5.5. on his MBP, but from everything we can tell, it's something wrong with his system only and not a systemic problem.

The above posts have very well identified the issues with running it, but if you're a small time editor and don't mind waiting for renders, etc., you should be okay.

I run it successfully (albeit slowly) on a rather cheap PC laptop with an i5 cpu and only 4GB of memory and a single internal hard drive (though I do have eSata on mine). It works, but it's certainly not as good as my dedicated editing rig.

I would recommend you download the trial version and install it on the MBP and play with it for a while before committing to it.