Magic Bullet performance on Intel Macs

[Eric Gan]

Question for users of the latest version of Magic Bullet Editors (FCP) on Intel Macs. How is the rendering speed these days? How close is it to real-time for some of the popular Look Suite presets (such as Basic)?

Will it make a difference if the Mac has an ATI or an Nvidia card? (i.e. 17/20" iMacs vs 24" iMac).

I am coming from a G4 Powerbook setup, so I just wanted to get a sense of the performance increase before upgrading. Thanks.

[Michael Y Wong]

Originally Posted by Eric Gan

Will it make a difference if the Mac has an ATI or an Nvidia card? (i.e. 17/20" iMacs vs 24" iMac).

Eric,

I cant speak for Macs for certain but for PCs with a supported video card Magic Bullet can have like a 2000% increase in rendering times, I kid you not.

If your main offline edit is still the SD Mini Dv yes with the proper video card you will have faster then realtime rendering and real time previewing @ best quality settings.

I use a 7950GX2 on my pentium D and SD rendering in MB Editors flies, even more so when I enable SLI, too bad I do 95% of my work in native HDV.

For more info:
http://redgiantsoftware.com/mbe2whatsnew.html

[Greg Quinn]

My experience with the MB editors is that they run fast on my Mac Pro, and many of the effects run realtime. The speed of the interlaced->progressive function in MB Suite is something else though, and I wouldn't want to run a lot of footage through that (unless I had unlimited time).

[Eric Gan]

Thanks for the replies guys. Do you know what specific features on the video card Magic Bullet utilizes for its "DeepColor RT" engine? I have not kept up with the hardware side of things for a while now, and I've never really looked for cutting edge graphic cards since I don't play any games.

Cheers,