Greetings everyone.
A couple of weeks ago, I was involved in a test here at work which put an Alienware tower vs. a Mac Pro.
The Alienware machine uses a Dual opteron 280 (2.4 ghz) 4 gb RAM (2.75 recogized by 32 bit Win XP), Nvidia 7900 GeForce vid card with a Matrox Axio LE accelerator card. The Mac Pro is a 3.0 GHz model with 4 GB of ram and ATI Radeon X1900 w/512MB VRAM. I had an AJA Kona 2 LHe card, and only used it for playback monitoring.
This test utilized footage shot on XDCAM HD and HDV 1080i60. A 3 minute feature was then cut using multiple layered effects throughout. I used Motion to create some backgrounds, and edited the motion files directly to the timeline. Once both systems had comparable timelines, both machines had their render caches cleared, and started rendering at the same time. I was really surprised at the initial results. The Premiere box took 15 minutes to render, while the Mac Pro took 26 minutes.
I suspected that the slower render had something to do with my .motn files...some of which used some particle generators. So with the help of Activity Monitor, I ran the render again, this time watching the CPU monitor, and noticed that when the .motn files were being processed, only one core was being used. So I took those .motn files, exported them as .mov's, and made the respective replacements on my timeline. This time when rendering, all 4 cores were being used, and render times dropped by 11 minutes.
It was my understanding that .motn files created within a FCP project and then edited to the timeline were handled as native files, but still required rendering. After doing some research, I was reminded that Motion utilizes the GPU more than the CPU. I originally thought that was only the case for realtime playback, but it could also explain the lack of core usage during the render process.
My initial impressions of the Mac Pro were quite impressive. During the ingest/edit phase, it was a fast and solid machine. But due to the massive layering and keyframing for this test, playback was understandibly sluggish, but stable. The MP never locked or crashed, nor did it ever require a restart while editing. The Mac Pro is the quietest computer I've ever heard, or not heard. Even when rendering, I couldn't hear any noise from the MP...probably because the fans on the Alienware box were drowning it out.
The Mac Pro performed at full potential out of the box, whereas the Premiere suite required a $4000 accelerator card to achieve similar results. I know that the test machines were not equal. So this render test was conducted on a Premiere suite with a 3.0 Xeon box with similar specs to the Mac Pro. Render times were still faster than the MP, but still required the Axio.
One of the biggest differences between these 2 editing systems is the ability to edit "natively". I'll use XDCAM HD as an example. For Premiere to edit this footage "natively" it required Axio drivers. For Final Cut, it required a free download of Sony's XDCAM Transfer Browser. This browser can launch from within Final Cut, and gives a proxy resolution of all clips on an XDCAM disc. The editor can then set In and Out points, create a batch import list, import in the background while marking other clips. The Transfer Browser then loads those clips directly into your project's browser. The whole process is really user-friendly and very intuitive.
The final word. When it comes to video editing and graphics, the Mac is still a high-quality, cost-effective solution. When pricing a PC system and a Mac system, the Mac came out about $5000 cheaper, and most importantly, works right out of the box.
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