Optimizing software for Mac. Or why is final cut faster than Adobe

[Urmegil]

In one discussion I learned that final cut pro is much faster than adobe premiere. After doing lot of googling I was not sure if both of these programs do the same work. Mostly because I have zero experience in this field.
One of the reason was that its optimised for Mac, but Mac use different CPUs and different GPUs also RAM speeds are different for each version of hardware they sell. Is it possible to optimize software so much that you get render times so drastically different?

 

 So if someone could please explain me if its 5x faster due to insane optimization potencial for apps for Mac OR some way that Final cut outputs worse quality (or is it somehow doing much less work?)

 

Thank You

[dany_boy]

 

[dany_boy]

Imagine you have to design a glove to be worn by thousands of different kinds of people while doing its job of keeping hands warm and be comfortable. Some people have big hands, some have small hands, long fingers, fat fingers, etc etc. Not easy to please them all and most certainly not everyone can use them to the full extent, so you have to design something universal while making lots of compromises. is a PC, since we can choose between thousands upon thousands of hardware iterations, optimizing software can be hard and generally not so good.

 

On the other hand (pun intended), imagine you design a glove to be worn by only a couple of very similar people. That is a lot easier since they are all similar, so you can tailor the product to their specific requirements and capacities. That is Mac, since they all use fairly similar hardware based on consistent and closely picked architectures within product families.

 

Gross over-simplification but I hope it helps you to understand optimization.

[79wjd]

Final Cut is faster because it uses Intel Quicksync (there are other third party programs that also use Intel Quicksync), not so much because of optimization. Quicksync doesn't offer the same quality as normal render techniques, but it does still offer good quality while allowing much faster render times.

[EunSoo]

Each generation of macs all have the same generation and architecture of CPU, GPU etc... While they are different models the only difference is clockspeeds, cores and such. Since there are only those minor differences, it is very easy to optimize the software to that hardware and macOS. Even though there is some vareity, there is much less than Windows computers. And no, it isn't outputting worse quality videos. Look at MKBHD and Casey Neistat's youtube videos, all made on Final Cut Pro.

[Urmegil]

16 minutes ago, SCGazelle said:

Each generation of macs all have the same generation and architecture of CPU, GPU etc... 

So they have to optimize for each supported generation of apple products, since each uses slightly different architecture of CPU (all is from intel so there is not much changing)?

 

But I still find it unbelievable that the difference can be as big, is there some way that you can proof it or will I have to just take your word?

[EunSoo]

4 minutes ago, Urmegil said:

So they have to optimize for each supported generation of apple products, since each uses slightly different architecture of CPU (all is from intel so there is not much changing)?

 

But I still find it unbelievable that the difference can be as big, is there some way that you can proof it or will I have to just take your word?

About the optimization thing or that Final Cut Pro is faster?

[Urmegil]

3 minutes ago, SCGazelle said:

About the optimization thing or that Final Cut Pro is faster?

Generally about optimization. I checked and most people agree that there is no loss in quality in final cut ( I know there is loss of quality when encoding on CPU vs GPU).

 

For example I know that Doom is well coded game in the sense that functions and algorithms are well optimized ( using quicksort instead of bubblesort ), but this kind of optimization has nothing to do with hardware

[79wjd]

8 hours ago, Urmegil said:

Generally about optimization. I checked and most people agree that there is no loss in quality in final cut ( I know there is loss of quality when encoding on CPU vs GPU).

There is no question the POSSIBILITY for the loss of quality. Final Cut uses Intel Quicksync; that is why it's fast, not because of some voodoo Apple magic. Quicksync is inferior in terms of quality but is significantly faster. Now, if you are rendering something in Adobe at the non-highest settings and in FCP at the highest settings, than FCP can probably be just as good in terms of looks, but the best quality in Adobe will be better than the best qulity in FCP simply because Quicksync technically offers lesser image quality. With that said, for things like Youtube, that lower quality is mostly irrelevant, but for other things....well, it depends on the specific use case. 

[Urmegil]

14 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

There is no question the POSSIBILITY for the loss of quality. Final Cut uses Intel Quicksync

I think I get it now, you dont see he difference in quality when watching YT videos because YT adds its own compression and encoding. And theater movies edited in FCP used highest quality settings so difference was not noticeable. Thank you, I learned a lot for my own sake and also for recommending friend a software to do some amateur level editing.