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MillimeterTest Drive: MacBook Pro vs. Mac Pro, Part 1
Sep 10, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
30in. Cinema display
Hard Disk Capacity and Performance
Of course, CPU wasn’t the only factor that disqualified notebooks for serious editing; without sufficient hard disk space, it’s hard to be productive. Older notebooks lacked the space and power capacity for drives capable of editing HDV, but that dynamic is also changing.
With a maximum capacity of 250GB, the MacBook Pro has more than sufficient capacity for even multiple-hour, multiple-camera productions. And, with the same Serial-ATA interface found on most desktops, the read/write speed is clearly adequate even for multiple camera productions, as we’ll see in our next issue.
Not to beat a drum too loudly, but Apple has been the leader in the adoption of FireWire 800, which gives you the fastest possible integrated connection to affordable external drives. In our next edition, we’ll also see how that compares to the USB 2 found on most other notebooks. Of course, you can supplement FireWire 800 with a host of third-party options to other external disk types, such as SATA, but we’ll leave further comparative tests of SATA vs. FireWire 800 for another day.
Graphics and Display
In terms of graphics, the MacBook Pro comes with an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with dual-link DVI support and 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, which is more than enough processor for straight video editing. Unless you’re doing extreme 3D design work or using multiple 3D effect plug-ins, you probably won’t notice the difference between the MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro equipped with an Nvidia Quadro FX card.
On the other hand, the MacBook Pro’s 17in., 1680x1050 display is definitely dwarfed by Apple’s 23in. Cinema display, and if you’ve upgraded to the 30in. display, working on the road will be positively depressing. There are some software tweaks you can make to improve the experience somewhat, but unless you carry your LCD panels with you, the size of your notebook display will be significantly smaller than what you’re used to.
What We Tested
To set up what you’ll read about in a couple of weeks, let me tell you what I tried to measure with my tests. Basically, rendering performance is fairly easy to test, and certainly there will be plenty of that. On the other hand, you typically spend much more time editing than rendering, which you can do at night and on weekends. So I also tried to assess the difference in subjective experience afforded by the two platforms—although obviously these results are more subjective.
For the record, my main Premiere Pro project was a four camera, mixed format concert shoot, which I mixed with Premiere’s multicamera tool and burned to SD DVD. On Final Cut Pro, I edited a single-camera concert shoot and interview. Check Part 2 for the results of my tests.
