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Apple Mac Pro vs. MacBook Pro Test Drive, Part 2

Sep 28, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

Table 8. Rendering times for Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro using a Verbatim SureFire 250GB drive in FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 modes.

Working with external drives

Much of the time when you produce video with a notebook, you have to store your source videos on an external drive. Since I had a Verbatim SureFire 250GB drive handy (available for around $100), with support for both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, I thought that I would rerun some of my benchmarks and compare the results. Table 8 tells the tale.

While rendering a single-camera shoot in Final Cut Pro, FireWire 800 mode was actually slightly faster than the internal drive, and the USB mode was slightly slower. While rendering a three-camera shoot with Premiere Pro, FireWire 800 mode was 2 percent slower, compared to 17 percent slower in USB 2.0 mode.

Why so little difference in three of four results? In slower-than-realtime activities such as encoding, file retrieval from disc isn't the bottleneck, so slower retrieval times don't slow the overall process significantly. As shown in the Premiere Pro USB 2.0 results, retrieving five files simultaneously via USB is a bottleneck, resulting in a significant difference in encoding time.

What about the editing experience? Here's the rub. Even in FireWire 800, Premiere's multicam monitor lost audio/video sync after 10 or 15 seconds, complicating the edit. So if you're planning multicam editing in either program (especially Final Cut Pro if you've ingested into PreRes), using a FireWire 800 or especially a USB external drive could be problematic. For many single-camera shoots, however, an external drive shouldn't significantly affect production time.