New Mac choice for FCPX?

[William Hohauser]

Apparently the new version of FCPX has had a rewriting of the rendering engine which speeds up rendering significantly. As I rarely render before a final export, I didn't notice but other people have: http://fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/954...pro-x-timeline
I did notice that FCPX can now export in the background and still give you plenty of CPU power to continue to edit other projects.

The Bare Feats tests are now unrepresentative of the software as well as the hardware but still can give an idea of the differences between the Mac product lines.

[Nigel Barker]

Hmmm. The Quad-Core 15" Retina MacBook Pro is twice as fast as the Dual-Core 13" Retina MacBook Pro so no surprise there.

It would be really good to see some benchmarks of FCP X on a dual CPU Mac Pro not least because FCP 7 can only use one CPU & it would be nice to have confirmation that they like Adobe with Premiere Pro that Apple have actually written it to properly use multiple CPUs with multiple cores.

[William Hohauser]

I can tell you from experience that FCPX on my 2009 dual 8 core MacPro was initially only modestly faster than my 2010 17" MacBookPro when the program first came out. Of course Compressor was much, much faster with the QuickCluster enabled on the MacPro which isn't possible on a quad-core. What really pulled the MacPro ahead was replacing the video card from the basic card it came with. I didn't go with the most expensive card but the change in real-time effect responsiveness and rendering was noticeable. All MacPros come with FCPX friendly cards now. Right now I am not sure how the new software will change this but it seems substantial. Just as a note, while Adobe has put a lot of effort into CPU optimization making real-time editing with Premier much easier than FCP7, you still have to render out. And Compressor with QuickCluster beats out the Adobe Media Encoder on many of the same type of renders, at least on my computer.