MacBook Pro: Specs means nothing (at least when Apple's in the equation)

[Bananasplit_00]

56 minutes ago, Jovidah said:

That's what people keep saying but I have yet to see an actual apples to apples comparison. Why not run Premiere on both computers? This comparison doesn't show off OSX...it only shows off FCP.

FCP is optemised to run on the specific hardware that apple allows and thats why its good

[captain_to_fire]

17 hours ago, Jovidah said:

Now imagine turning a proper specced laptop into a hackintosh to run Final Cut Pro... THAT would be a nice apples to apples comparison. 

These comparisons tell more about Premiere than about the Macbook.

Hackintosh is for cheap people.

[captain_to_fire]

I'd like to see @LinusTech to run those benchmarks he often uses to asses performance on the macOS, not using a Windows partition in a boot camp. For example, Geekbench is avaialble on Mac, so does Tomb Raider and others. I think the only thing missing for Mac is AIDA64. For whatever reason, I'm not buying his review of the iMac Retina 5K where he says that it drastically does thermal throttling because he did the test on a Windows 8 partition.

 

Same goes for his video "Can you edit 4K on an Ultrabook", the reason why it sucks to edit on an Asus ultrabook is because you're using crappy Adobe Premiere. I challenge you Linus, try editing/exporting a 10 minutes 4K footage and use Final Cut Pro X.

Edited November 7, 2016 by hey_yo_

[Jovidah]

1 hour ago, abazigal said:

That's the whole point. You can run Final Cut Pro on a Mac and only a Mac, and the guy is evidently able to get his job done way better on Final Cut Pro compared to other video editing software out there. 

 

It's like saying that without his powers, Superman would lose to Batman in a fight. Maybe that's true, but that's also besides the point, because most of the time, Superman will have his powers and you will have to take that into consideration. It will never be an Apples to Apples comparison, and that's perfectly fine. 

 

Specs are the means, results are the end. Why the fixation on premiere when it is clearly shown as not working for TLD?

 

32 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

FCP is optemised to run on the specific hardware that apple allows and thats why its good

That's what people keep saying but I haven't ever seen proof of it. The processors are the same. It really sounds like a load of bull until I can see it in an apples to apples comparison. If it really was so much more superior on Apple hardware, why keep it as an exclusive? It sounds more like they're keeping it an exclusive because releasing it to PC would cut into their hardware sales.

 

FCP is continuously brought up as 'proof' of superiority of the Apple / OSX ecosystem, while it doesn't prove either. All it does prove is that FCP (on a Mac) is superior to Adobe Premiere (on Windows). It doesn't even prove software is faster on Apple vs a Windows PC. It doesn't prove things are faster on OSX instead of a PC. It doesn't even prove FCP is optimized for Apple in the first place. For all we know it could run just as fast or even faster when allowed to run in Windows. 

 

It's like comparing the speed of Superman eating ice cream to the speed of Batman eating chilli peppers, and then using that as proof that Superman has has a bigger dick - even though girth might be lacking. It's just complete bogus.

[Bananasplit_00]

27 minutes ago, Jovidah said:

 

That's what people keep saying but I haven't ever seen proof of it. The processors are the same. It really sounds like a load of bull until I can see it in an apples to apples comparison. If it really was so much more superior on Apple hardware, why keep it as an exclusive? It sounds more like they're keeping it an exclusive because releasing it to PC would cut into their hardware sales.

 

FCP is continuously brought up as 'proof' of superiority of the Apple / OSX ecosystem, while it doesn't prove either. All it does prove is that FCP (on a Mac) is superior to Adobe Premiere (on Windows). It doesn't even prove software is faster on Apple vs a Windows PC. It doesn't prove things are faster on OSX instead of a PC. It doesn't even prove FCP is optimized for Apple in the first place. For all we know it could run just as fast or even faster when allowed to run in Windows. 

 

It's like comparing the speed of Superman eating ice cream to the speed of Batman eating chilli peppers, and then using that as proof that Superman has has a bigger dick - even though girth might be lacking. It's just complete bogus.

only the exclusives are optemised, thats why they are exclusive in the first place. they keep it exclusive just to optemise for lesser hardware. FCP will render and export the same project faster then a windows PC will running the closest thing we have to compare which is Premiere. it will not beat a windows PC in rendering and exporting premiere if it has the same specs however. that would be just equal seeing as adobe hasent focused on one ecosystem and focuses on selling as many copies as possible instead. 

[abazigal]

1 hour ago, Jovidah said:

 

That's what people keep saying but I haven't ever seen proof of it. The processors are the same. It really sounds like a load of bull until I can see it in an apples to apples comparison. If it really was so much more superior on Apple hardware, why keep it as an exclusive? It sounds more like they're keeping it an exclusive because releasing it to PC would cut into their hardware sales.

 

FCP is continuously brought up as 'proof' of superiority of the Apple / OSX ecosystem, while it doesn't prove either. All it does prove is that FCP (on a Mac) is superior to Adobe Premiere (on Windows). It doesn't even prove software is faster on Apple vs a Windows PC. It doesn't prove things are faster on OSX instead of a PC. It doesn't even prove FCP is optimized for Apple in the first place. For all we know it could run just as fast or even faster when allowed to run in Windows. 

 

It's like comparing the speed of Superman eating ice cream to the speed of Batman eating chilli peppers, and then using that as proof that Superman has has a bigger dick - even though girth might be lacking. It's just complete bogus.

That's the whole idea. Apple uses software to sell hardware and Final Cut Pro is there to sell Macs to video-editing professionals. They have no interest in converting it to Windows, much less selling it to non-Mac users. 

[79wjd]

3 hours ago, Jovidah said:

That's what people keep saying but I have yet to see an actual apples to apples comparison. Why not run Premiere on both computers? This comparison doesn't show off OSX...it only shows off FCP.

Premiere on a Mac won't magically run better than Premiere on Windows. With identically spec'd systems it could potentially even run worse depending on whether or not Adobe gives a shit about OS X (i.e. how much effort they put into the OS X version) or visa-versa.

 

That's exactly the point -- though. The video is showing that FCP is much faster than Premiere. So making the claim that a Mac is underspec'd isn't meaningful unless you also take into account what software is being run. So, if FCP satisfies your needs, then a Mac with FCP will render content faster than a Windows computer running Premiere.

 

[suicidalfranco]

Hackitosh beating Macs

 

Conclusion: Macs aren't made of fairy dust and unicorn flour + specs do matter 

[kaiju_wars]

I think people are missing the point.  You have to talk about the whole experience, that includes software you can only get on a specific platform.

 

That means it's not all about specs per say.  Yes, specs play a big role, but so does software.  

[spartaman64]

so all this shows is that the software is better optimized on macOS than on windows ok

[Misanthrope]

5 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

FCP is optemised to run on the specific hardware that apple allows and thats why its good

There is no specific Apple hardware, it's generic intel chips on an x86 platform.

 

This is no different than console exclusives: an entirely artificial way to get you to spend money on an expensive, closed platform that limits your user experience because fuck you, that's why.

[LAwLz]

12 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

Exactly, it's NOT the hardware specs (hence the title specs means nothing). People everywhere keep bashing Apple about how the specs on the new MBP isn't for Pro's and all I was doing was showing to you all that specs doesn't come into play here

Most people I've seen are not complaining solely about the specs of the Macbook Pro not being "pro". They complain about lots of other things too such as the laughable amount of adapters you will need.

 

 

12 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

http://noamkroll.com/there-is-massive-quality-difference-between-fcp-x-premiere-pro-guess-which-one-is-far-better-at-compression/

This is one article I found that says clearly the opposite. Besides, if FCPX output quality is worse I'm pretty sure I found have found so many articles about it. Besides, Marques Brownlee has an off the roof overkill camera setup for his YouTube videos (even movie makers don't use as expensive setups) so it's safe to assume that he would've never switched to Final Cut if indeed there was a noticable quality difference even if it really doesn't matter after uploaded to Youtube

That entire article is shite for a number of reasons.

1) We don't know if he was using GPU accelerated encoding or not. He does not say which Mac he uses (not all of them supports QuickSync) either so I can't even guess.

2) His comparison is idiotic. You do not use JPEG to compare quality, ever. You use a lossless format. For all we know, the artifacts we see in his comparison images might not be in the original file. They might 100% be from whichever program he used to create the JPEGs. When you do an image quality comparison, you ALWAYS use a lossless image format like PNG. Anything else renders the comparison shots completely untrustworthy and useless.

3) He did not post the original image (before the transcode taking place) so we have no idea what the scene should actually look like. He says the Adobe one has a red tint but for all we know that might be the correct color, and FCP is adding a green tint.

4) The Premier image is a lot blockier, but the FCP image is a lot more grainy. Artifacts like the ones you see in the Adobe image are very common JPEG artifacts, so like I said before we have no idea of knowing if those are from the image being converted to JPEG, or from the actual video encode. JPEG does however not add noise to an image so it is pretty safe to guess that the noise is there in the original Final Cut file.

 

There is a quality difference. It's just that the video gets transcoded again when they are uploaded to YouTube, so the extra quality would mostly be wasted and so the extra time it would take is not worth it. Besides, Adobe's encoder is crap so it might not be that much better than QuickSync (and I doubt many people feel like exporting from Premier in a lossless format, then run that file though a good encoder like x264).

 

 

13 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

Maybe you might be talking about Intel QuickSync in specific, but you don't have any idea what FCPX actually has that improves the quality while maintaing the speed

It is QuickSync, and it's not magic.

It's not a coincident that all devices that supports QuickSync, such as the dual core 13" Macbook Pro outperforms the 8 core Mac Pro when exporting from Final Cut. This benchmark should also disprove everyone who thinks it is because of optimizations because "OS X is great because it runs on specific hardware and that allows Apple to optimize it really well". If that was the case then the Mac Pro 2013 would destroy the MacBook Pro, which it doesn't.

 

 

13 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

From my understanding, Video editing requires a CPU, GPU and RAM all of which are lesser specs than the HP specter compared to here.

And everyone here at LTT Forum complains about how the MBP isn't a pro machine based on specs, so this is an actual proof that states otherwise

Well that's because you are ignorant.

 

13 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

Except no one considers QuickSync as specs.

I do, because it is. As you can see in the benchmark above, because of the media engine the dual core Macbook Pro outperforms the 8 core Mac Pro in this particular test. Remove that piece of hardware and the Macbook Pro would be terrible slow and the Mac Pro would run circles around it.

 

13 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

The reason for the title is becasue so many ill-informed people here still think that higher numbers on data sheet means higher performance (like an ideal physics world) when it's clearly not. I don't know in what terms the specs are great, at least the specs used in video editing

It generally does actually, at least for comparable tasks. It's just that you need to know what specs to look for.

A dual core AMD CPU at 3GHz will be slower than a dual core Intel CPU at 2.9GHz. Does that mean that "specs doesn't matter because the CPU with lower GHz is faster!"?

Of course not, because most people on this forum will know that because of Intel's superior architecture 1GHz on their chip does not equal 1GHz on an AMD CPU.

 

13 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

It's not and I do know it. I know that you haven't been visiting the forum for past few days (becasue i didn't see a single comment on by now 20 different MacBook Pro threads) but as I said above people think specs measn everyhting for some goddamm reason if they're proved otherwise

btw, I'm flattered how you went remembered my comment in an ancient thread and went through all trouble finding it

I've been here. I just haven't posted in Macbook Pro threads. Believe it or not, but I don't actually post in every thread I see, nor do I particularly enjoy posting bad things about Apple (or any company for that matter). I post when I think that I can contribute something to the thread. In the case of the dozen of threads about Macbook Pro adapters everything I want to say has already been said by someone else.

 

Anyway, I am one of those people who do think specs is everything. It's just that specs are more than just the GHz of a CPU, or the number of GB of RAM.

[79wjd]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Anyway, I am one of those people who do think specs is everything. It's just that specs are more than just the GHz of a CPU, or the number of GB of RAM.

You have to keep in mind who the target audience of some videos/content is/are. Most videos over-simplify things either because they don't know better or because it's all that the audience really "needs" to know. Either way, imo, if you're talking to the typical individual, it's enough to say that specs don't matter because trying to explain why they matter but also why they're not comparable is going to be a nightmare and from their point of view, the conclusion will be the same. 

 

Anyway, you mentioned further up that Quicksync offers "faster"-preset levels of quality, according to Wikipedia, Ivy offered "faster" levels, and then Haswell improved the quality. I don't know how accurate that is though.

 

P.s. any good reads on quicksync? 

[RedRound2]

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

There is a quality difference.

 

Can you back this up with some kind or real proof? Not QuickSync but FCPX. As far as I see videos look have always looked great on Final Cut exports and every single video of Team Crispy is a true eye candy

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

It is QuickSync, and it's not magic.

It's not a coincident that all devices that supports QuickSync, such as the dual core 13" Macbook Pro outperforms the 8 core Mac Pro when exporting from Final Cut. This benchmark should also disprove everyone who thinks it is because of optimizations because "OS X is great because it runs on specific hardware and that allows Apple to optimize it really well". If that was the case then the Mac Pro 2013 would destroy the MacBook Pro, which it doesn't.

 

I never said it was magic. All I'm saying is that in the end this is the result when compared to a higher end alternative

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Well that's because you are ignorant.

 

How am I ignorant again?

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I do, because it is. As you can see in the benchmark above, because of the media engine the dual core Macbook Pro outperforms the 8 core Mac Pro in this particular test. Remove that piece of hardware and the Macbook Pro would be terrible slow and the Mac Pro would run circles around it.

2

You have to remember the you are not everyone

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It generally does actually, at least for comparable tasks. It's just that you need to know what specs to look for.

A dual core AMD CPU at 3GHz will be slower than a dual core Intel CPU at 2.9GHz. Does that mean that "specs doesn't matter because the CPU with lower GHz is faster!"?

Of course not, because most people on this forum will know that because of Intel's superior architecture 1GHz on their chip does not equal 1GHz on an AMD CPU.

 

I didn't literally mean higer numbers. What I meant is superior specs which means nothing if the OS or the software doesn't know what to do with it

 

I don't have time to reply to everything hence these shortliners

 

[LAwLz]

12 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

Anyway, you mentioned further up that Quicksync offers "faster"-preset levels of quality, according to Wikipedia, Ivy offered "faster" levels, and then Haswell improved the quality. I don't know how accurate that is though.

 

P.s. any good reads on quicksync? 

Sadly, not many people do comparisons for different codecs, and I don't have anything later than Sandy Bridge to do my own testing with.

I said that it is comparable to faster to give myself some room for error. The reports I have read actually shows Sandy Bridge's highest quality setting (TU 1) being very comparable to x264's Superfast preset both in terms of speed and image quality.

(x264 preset goes: Ultrafast -> Superfast -> Veryfast -> Faster -> Fast -> Medium...)

 

You can look at some test results in this pdf, starting at page 99.

The first 99 pages is mostly x264 crushing other software encoders.

 

I'm at work right now but I'll try and find some good links later. The doom9 forums is by far the best place to find info about video codecs.

[suicidalfranco]

can someone here with an XPS 9550 do an hackintosh, run cpx and put a rest to this fairy tale

 

[qwertywarrior]

final cut pro doesnt have any kind of magic encoder

 

there is something happening here

[Zodiark1593]

Anyone know if the AMD GPU has any effect on export speeds in FCP, or does it primarily lean on Quicksync? 

[79wjd]

1 minute ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Anyone know if the AMD GPU has any effect on export speeds in FCP, or does it primarily lean on Quicksync? 

Just quicksync afaik (see if you can find a FCP review with a Haswell 15" with dGPU vs. 15" without)

[Zodiark1593]

6 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Just quicksync afaik (see if you can find a FCP review with a Haswell 15" with dGPU vs. 15" without)

Something I thought of too just now. A real apples to apples comparison would be a Mac Pro vs the MacBook Pro/iMac in Final Cut Pro. (Apple really likes their "Pro" moniker). 

[79wjd]

1 minute ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Something I thought of too just now. A real apples to apples comparison would be a Mac Pro vs the MacBook Pro/iMac in Final Cut Pro. (Apple really likes their "Pro" moniker). 

Somewhere (I think in this thread) there is a Mac Pro vs. MBP comparison, and the Mac Pro gets trashed. 

[79wjd]

4 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Something I thought of too just now. A real apples to apples comparison would be a Mac Pro vs the MacBook Pro/iMac in Final Cut Pro. (Apple really likes their "Pro" moniker). 

On 11/7/2016 at 0:24 PM, LAwLz said:

 

 

 

[Zodiark1593]

12 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

 

So specs do, in fact matter. As long as the processor (one of said specs) supports Quicksync, you're good to go. Otherwise, best budget for an upgrade, or if you've a Mac Pro, a downgrade. 

[LAwLz]

54 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

 

 

39 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

So specs do, in fact matter. As long as the processor (one of said specs) supports Quicksync, you're good to go. Otherwise, best budget for an upgrade, or if you've a Mac Pro, a downgrade. 

It's also worth noting that in other things that can't be offloaded to QuickSync the Mac Pro destroys the Macbook Pro and iMac. It's just that for that one particular task (encoding H.264) QuickSync is much faster than doing it on the CPU.

[TheReal1980]

No one is talking about battery life.

When you are out, far away from a power outlet, it is important to get the most of your battery. If it renders quicker (2-3 times quicker sometimes) it will let me render a lot more videos and/or do a lot more work. The Macbook could even have half the battery size and it would still be a better alternative.

 

Personally I am looking for a new portable Mac. Now I use a Macbook Air but the screen is awful so I am leaning towards a 15" Macbook Pro BUT I am not sure I want the new one with the touch bar because I want the old style keys. For me who work with images, Xcode for iOS software and some AutoCad I can use an older Macbook Pro without any problem what so ever so right now I am looking to buy a new 2014 or 2015 model. It has Thunderbolt 2 which is enough for me (I have two external Thunderbolt drives), it has a much better screen than the Air, it has the better keyboard, it has USB A and Magsafe..... it will be more than enough for me.