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

Sep 24, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Just to get you up to speed, let’s review. This article attempts to contrast and compare the video editing experience on an Apple MacBook Pro notebook computer and dual-processor, dual-core Mac Pro desktop. In the last installment, I detailed each computer’s specs, discussed the difference in screen size and disk capacity and the like. In this segment, I detail the subjective and objective differences in the editing experience and pass along some tips to make editing on the road more efficient.

Let’s break editing into three basic tasks; capture/ingest, editing, and rendering. In most instances, capture is realtime, so the experience is similar irrespective of platform. Simple. With these two systems, whenever you actually render—whether to produce a file, compute Studio 1 Productions SmoothCam coordinates, or render a timeline for pixel accurate preview—the desktop will outperform the MacBook Pro by about 2:1. Simple again.

Editing

In between capture and rendering is actual editing, where the experience is much closer and more subjective. Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro provide flexible preview systems that can dynamically degrade playback speed and/or quality to maintain full speed preview. With simple, cut-and-paste editing, even of HDV-class source video, the subjective editing experience from a performance perspective will be very similar between desktop and notebook. As projects get more complex—either via exotic formats (uncompressed HD), exotic effects, or mulitple streams—performance begins to diverge.

What is surprising is how long the notebook can keep pace with the desktop. For example, in one Final Cut Pro project I edited concert footage shot with AVCHD and converted to ProRes by Final Cut Pro during ingest. I set preview to Unlimited RT on both the notebook and desktop, then added Color Correction, Desaturate Lows, and Broadcast Safe to all clips in both projects. The edits were simple; the song on stage at the time interspersed with B-roll shots of the lights, crowd, folks dancing in the isles, and such.

In this scenario, the MacBook Pro easily kept up with the Mac Pro desktop. Trimming was equally efficient; preview was realtime with no visible degradation.

Then, because the footage was handheld, I applied Final Cut Pro’s SmoothCam filter to a 6-second slice of B-roll, which was in a separate captured clip. The Mac Pro desktop analyzed the file in 3:08 (min:sec) while the MacBook Pro took 2:13. I added a Motion title; both systems previewed in realtime, but clearly dropped frames. To get a pixel-perfect preview, I rendered the title; the Mac Pro finished in 31 seconds, the MacBook Pro in 73 seconds. Again, while editing, the experience is very similar: As soon as you force a render of some kind, the Mac Pro prevails.

I then tried a sequence with two HDV clips, one superimposed over the other via greenscreen using the Chroma Keyer filter and a four-point garbage matte (Figure 2). Here again, both systems previewed in realtime with very similar quality.

Then I went for the jugular. Reasoning that the RAID system on the desktop would provide faster and more efficient file retrieval than the MacBook Pro, I created multiple copies of the same high-definition ProRes source file. Then, with one video file as the background file, I started adding the other files in picture in picture configuration and previewed. On the MacBook Pro, RT Extreme caved when I added the third video, displaying the error message shown in Figure 3.

In contrast, the Mac Pro easily retrieved and played six streams, even after I rotated each video and added color correction. Of course, how often does six-stream, realtime playback really matter while you’re editing?

To answer that question, I turned to Premiere Pro, and edited a few songs from a recent concert. This project was a four-camera, multiformat shoot with one camera shooting 1280p, one DV, and two shooting good old interlaced 1080i HDV. When editing a multicamera shoot in Premiere Pro, you choose camera angles in the multicam interface (Figure 4) that displays each camera angle and that of the selected camera (on the right). You click play, all videos play, and you choose the angle by clicking on it or via keyboard shortcuts. Then you can fine-tune the edits on the timeline.

On the desktop system, Premiere Pro played all four feeds at more or less realtime—although it was clear that the DV camera, which was being zoomed about 3X to fit the HDV frame, was displayed in draft quality. On the Mac Pro, each video seemed to play about 2fps to 3fps, which was more than sufficent for the edit decisions I had to make. Basically, even on a multicam project, which is about as demanding as they get, from an editing perspective, the MacBook Pro got the job done.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.