Premiere Pro CC and the New Mac Pro (2014)

Report · Feb 21, 2014

I'm expecting delivery soon of a new Mac Pro, nicely loaded, which I purchased mainly because of all the work I do with video. Yet, I read in a review that Adobe Premiere Pro isn't optimized to take advantage of the new Mac Pro, won't run faster, and I'm better off using Apple's Final Cut.

1. Is this true?; and

2. If so, will Premiere Pro be updated any time soon to run best on a 2014 Mac Pro?

My new Mac Pro will have the following configuration:

•	3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache

•	32GB (4x8GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC

•	1TB PCIe-based flash storage

•	Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

Report · May 01, 2014

Took delivery of my new Mac Pro yesterday after a 4 month wait while Apple built it. I have been a user of Premiere since Premiere 5 (pre CS, circa 2000). After getting everything installed and tweaked I have to say that I am floored by the performance so far.

I upgraded from a 2009 Mac Pro dual Quad 2.66, w/48gb Ram, Quadro 4000m, (3) 10,000rpm drives.

New Mac Pro is the biggest, baddest one you could build on the Apple site. There is a Pegasus 2 4tb Raid plugged in via Thinderbolt 2. I've been cutting on it for 3 hours now. Wow. Magic Bullett Suite runs in real time at full playback resolution. Exporting is almost real time. Even with plugins that would bog down the older Mac.

The test tonight is to put MB Denoiser on an hour of footage and export it. On the old Mac it would take up to 12 hours.

Report · May 01, 2014

I'm curious about the MB Denoiser test - that is always the stumbling block which makes my machine grind to a halt. (2009 MacPro as well)

Report · May 01, 2014

Dennis. What rez u use? I hace issues with open cl exporting larger files of 5 min with a bunch of filters. I use red raw at 4k rez in the tinelime. I am not too happy with my issue when open CL is on because the computer freezes and requires a hard boot

Ironically without open cl and software only mercury i can export limitless time lenght. Weird stuff and apple dont seem to figure it out either.

Enviado desde mi iPhone

El 01/05/2014, a las 05:25 p.m., denniscarrollAV <forums_noreply@adobe.com> escribió:
Re: Premiere Pro CC and the New Mac Pro (2014)
created by denniscarrollAV in Premiere Pro - View the full discussion
Took delivery of my new Mac Pro yesterday after a 4 month wait while Apple built it. I have been a user of Premiere since Premiere 5 (pre CS, circa 2000). After getting everything installed and tweaked I have to say that I am floored by the performance so far.

I upgraded from a 2009 Mac Pro dual Quad 2.66, w/48gb Ram, Quadro 4000m, (3) 10,000rpm drives.

New Mac Pro is the biggest, baddest one you could build on the Apple site. There is a Pegasus 2 4tb Raid plugged in via Thinderbolt 2. I've been cutting on it for 3 hours now. Wow. Magic Bullett Suite runs in real time at full playback resolution. Exporting is almost real time. Even with plugins that would bog down the older Mac.
The test tonight is to put MB Denoiser on an hour of footage and export it. On the old Mac it would take up to 12 hours.
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Report · May 01, 2014

Glad to hear it, Dennis!

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community & Engagement Strategist – Pro Video and Audio

Report · May 06, 2014

denniscarrollAV wrote:

After getting everything installed and tweaked I have to say that I am floored by the performance so far.

I upgraded from a 2009 Mac Pro dual Quad 2.66, w/48gb Ram, Quadro 4000m, (3) 10,000rpm drives.

I'm pretty surprised by the performance of the new Mac as well. I got the 8-core with the D700 cards. It replaced a highly modified Mac Pro 5,1 with aftermarket 3.46Ghz 6-core Xeons (x 2) and a GTX570 nVidia card. My standard benchmark is to the export of one of my race track videos. It's 2 1080p AVCHD inputs and a separate sound file (WAV). One camera is PiP'd on top of the other; that same camera is also scaled down 50%, cropped from the bottom by 30%, and then horizontally flipped so it looks like a rear view mirror image. From there, the entire video is scaled to 720p and exported to h.264 MPEG4.

My old Mac Pro could do it in real time plus some epsilon. My new on can do it in real time minus some epsilon. The kicker is that it makes no sound, whatsoever, while it's doing it. And it has one less Xeon processor in it.

Is it an order of magnitude faster than the last one? No. Is it even twice as fast? Nope. But it's doing more with less, and that's impressive.

ETA:

I don't know if the OP is still following this thread. For what it's worth: I performed the same benchmark on the latest Final Cut Pro X, since they have a 30-day free trial. The executive summary is: Premiere is still faster for what I do.

On my last Mac Pro, the same export would take twice real time with Final Cut Pro X. The main reasons: nVidia GPU that performed poorly in OpenCL, and an older, less-optimized version of FCPX. On the new Mac Pro with the latest FCPX, the export went from twice real time to half real time plus some epsilon. So basically: as fast as Premiere used to be on my old Mac Pro.

A huge improvement for FCPX, no question. But the application doesn't want to edit raw AVCHD footage without putting a .MOV wrapper around it first. When your files are gigs and gigs in size, this takes: a while. And it slows the editing process down. And, ultimately, the export process is still slower than the latest Premiere. Given all of that: I'm sticking w/Adobe.

Report · Mar 14, 2015

CC Merchant - I'm sorry but I have to disagree on the cost issue. In my evaluation, Lenovo is the most solid PC company out there. And so, I decided to price as well as possible apples to apples between Apple and Lenovo. The best comparison was garnered from Lenovo's new workstations due to the Grantley release and, of course, ECC RAM.

In that price comparison, the Lenovo build was so much less expensive that it warranted consideration. Here is what does warrant consideration.

AMD does not make a comparable GPU for PCs.
Cache size is really the only marker that Apple freely gives on it's Xeon processors - it intentionally leaves a lot of guesswork.
FCPX / Motion / etc. were all optimized for those AMD GPUs
Apple has been on a binge lately with pissing the developer community off and changing things because, "it knows best". My personal feeling is that, like Aperture, Motion will either get axed or get changed to a stupid interface removing the ability for it's largest user (churches) to benefit from it.
Adobe products are now the NLE of choice on any OS. Adobe, since it acquired Macromedia, has been listening to it's customers / users.

So... here is what I am doing in my 17 person studio (as of this writing)...

I have 95% switched from Macs to PCs - and yes it cost a bit to do it, but when planning for the future, not a huge issue.. I have stuck with Lenovo products due to quality (Sorry, Dell/HP/Whatever). P-Series Workstations - we've gone with the P700s. And we've leveraged the power and capability behind the new Xeon processors to speed things up both in development and rendering.

I did a test comparison and what took a Mac Pro of similar calibre 5 hours to render took our new P700 90 minutes. That has a price tag on it I can't even begin to explain in our business.

Report · Mar 14, 2015

I am very much interested in doing what you have done and was already looking at the Lenovo workstations as replacement for the Macs. If you don't mind, what CPU and graphics cards did you select for your workstations?

Thanks

MtD

Report · Mar 14, 2015

2X 2650 is what I went with. The Ghz + Cache were my primary considerations for render speeds. Near as I've discovered, Xeon offers caching whereas i7 does not. That being the major differentiator, I went with as high as we could afford.

30MB would be best, however, at lower Ghz, not as valuable. And, at that price jump when Ghz was high, I could no longer justify it. The truth is, you should test at what you have now, evaluate what you expect to get at high and low estimations, and determine of the time-savings are worth it.

One thing I considered too was our previous process - Because it was not cost effective for people to render during work hours, even for sanity-checks, I included measurements for the same process, Vs. what we could save by discovering issues in "real" time. Our productivity went up for our business (primarily corporate). At the level we went with, we were not only able to offer services at lower price points with higher margins, we were able to meet the immediacy our clients expect in this newish digital world. Sadly, people still don't realize render / upload times. So this enabled us to mitigate some of those conversations.

Report · Mar 14, 2015

Thanks for the info.

We are also facing intense competition, and are trying to be as efficient as possible throughout the production process.

MtD

Report · Mar 14, 2015

Thank you so much with sharing what you are doing regarding your conversion. I returned my Mac Pro (late 2013) and moving to a PC for editing. Apple was getting too expensive in terms of the slow renders and constant crashing issues when using Adobe PP. I never experienced issues with any other apps but Premiere.

Report · Mar 14, 2015

My pleasure - happy to talk / share anytime. RockerDown is the company, Rusty Worden is my name. Reach out anytime - totally happy to share what I've experienced / know.

Report · Mar 15, 2015

this also is entirely accurate those E5-2620's E5-2650's and models upward are beasts for CPU's!!! BIG fast caches if the architecture is right no choke points!!!

moreover this has also been my experience with ALOT more capable workstations!

Thank You

Report · Mar 15, 2015

people--- this guy is SPOT ON with his analysis-the key things to pay attention to of his words are :

1)"AMD does not make a comparable GPU for PCs" nor do they want to!
2)"Cache size is really the only marker that Apple freely gives on it's Xeon processors - it intentionally leaves a lot of guesswork.HA more like "screw you stupid buyers just buy it and deal with-here is another glass of my vintage merlot"-Ha HA!

3)Apple has been on a binge lately with pissing the developer community off and changing things because, "it knows best"(--TRUE THAT!). My personal feeling is that, like Aperture, Motion will either get axed or get changed to a stupid interface removing the ability for it's largest user (churches) to benefit from it.-You watch what happens to aperture and motion!

Great insight! good words to future proof--thank you, thank you very much!

Report · May 05, 2014

So far so good. I am shooting/editing Canon MXF format usually at 30f/50mbs. Premiere was able to export a 1:06:00 clip with MB Denoiser II on it in 4:11:00. A far better time than the 12-14 hours it took on my old 2009 Mac Pro. All done through ME.

Premiere has crashed once because of the dreaded "Error compiling movie" issue. I was able to sort that out pretty quick. But other than that I am pretty happy with the speed of workflow though I do feel like more can be done to utilize the new Mac Pro's awesome power.

Report · May 14, 2014

I typically run PrPro CC 2014 on two macs. One is an older MacPro tower with a 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon process and NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 display adapter (CUDA card). The other is a 2014 model MacBookPro with 2/3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and a PCIe NVIDIA GEForce GT 75 display card, as well as a built Intel Iris Pro card for Retina display.

I've noticed minimal performance differences between the two and feel that the macbook is a little better if anything. I don't have much in the way of tangible metrics to share either way, but I can run some basic comparisons now if it's helpful, as long as their based on media that I'd be able to get something similar to.

Report · May 16, 2014

It is very frustrating guys. Check this out. I have 115 min timeline RED RAW @4k. NO Color Grading, Nothing...Just raw. Even exporting at 720p VBR 1 pass which is lower quality it crashes at about 50 pct through. so I have to do the ironic thing of exporting 5 to 10 min at a time...a 7k$ Computer and I have to do that? Absurd and very frustrating. Apple never got back to me, they are playing fool game, and Adobe says the software matches the MAC PRO compatibility. So basically here we are paying the big bucks and they pretend that all seems fine!

Report · May 29, 2014

We have a Mac Pro and have been using it to edit our feature length cinema bound documentary film. The Mac Pro has had a few quirks because of OS X goof, but nothing major. As for speed, this system is a real screamer with Premiere CC. It does not even flinch with multiple files of 4K RAW video playing concurrently. Editing our footage has been very fast, no dropped frames and in full resolution.

The media composer is also extremely fast. We rendered a 20 minute 2K timeline in 18 minutes. On my iMac, this would have taken hours. Larry Jordan has some articles on the Mac Pro and its speed with media encoder. He notes that both Apple Compressor and Adobe Media Composer each have some places where one does better than the other, AND neither seems to be perfectly optimized for the Mac Pro, but both soon will be. Even so, Media Encoder does extremely well with it and is at least as fast and usable as Compressor.

Lastly, I moved from FCPX to Adobe Premiere and have not looked back. FCPX might now finally be stable,but when I started with it, it was extremely unstable and cause a lot of headaches. I can say from experience that Premiere, especially on the Mac Pro is extremely stable and reliable. Like I said, a few quirks, but nothing major.

Report · Apr 09, 2015

Hi KB8WFH,

Can you give us some more detail on your system? I'm very Jealous that you're machine is a real screamer with Premiere CC. I have no screaming at my end.

What flavour is the 4k footage you are working with? Are you also working in AE? Any Dynamic link action?

Report · Jun 19, 2015

Adobe tech support told me on the phone that the Mac AMD graphics cards (like in my late 2013 "trashcan" Mac Pro) is NOT compatible with Premiere CC. You can still edit but you get very choppy playback and strange hiccups here and there. Adobe acknowledged this with me. I was told by him "that a Premiere upgrade is due to be released this Summer and will fix this known problem." He recommended PC options that would work better in the meantime. So when Kevin says they are compatible it is misleading and contradictory information that flies in the face of all us users and their own internal Adobe people. I too spent thousands of dollars hoping to get a great system with Adobe and Mac. This is the first time in my 20 years of editing professionally that I ever experienced such a let down in the names I've grown to trust.

Yes, FCP works great on the Mac Pros. it was made for Mac pros. Premiere is meant for something else, PCs I guess.

Report · Jun 21, 2015

Went through hell last year with my new 'trash can'. Went through three of them, each more powerful than the last, as Apple kept saying I needed more of this and that....they said it would fix my issues and it never did. Finally sent it back. Now just still using my little mac mini, which, unbelievably is outperforming the MacPro in terms of fewer crashes, etc. I do need to upgrade this year but likely will be getting a PC for my editing. Bums me out because I love using my macs.

Report · Jun 03, 2014

I have lost days of work just in the last two weeks trying to export projects in Premiere Pro with my new Mac Pro. It takes hours of trying the numerous suggestions and possible fixes. No one suggestion fixes it every time. It's always something different. I have been a Premiere user for almost 15 years and this is by far the worst series of problems I have ever encountered. Premiere is almost unusable and we have been forced to downloaded and try the Final Cut Pro trial on a couple of our machines. I DONT WANT TO SWITCH. But if Adobe doesn't fix this soon we are going to have to. There are several big projects coming up and I do not feel comfortable starting post in Premiere.

Report · Jun 09, 2014

Just tried to export my first long project on pp cc, mac pro, and it keeps crashing. If it doensn't freeze, I get the error message saying I've run out of application memory. This sucks to say the least. What do I tell my client that's expecting a rough cut tomorrow? Not good.

Report · Jun 17, 2014

I've found myself in this exact situation. I've only used Premier for about 9 years, but as you've mentioned I no longer have any confidence in starting a project on Premier and expecting that I will be able to deliver it without issues or having to redo it in FinalCut X.

Report · Jun 09, 2014

Just got offline with Adobe tech and they forwarded me this link:

OS X 10.9.3 breaking Mac Pro graphics card compatibility with critical video editing apps | 9to5Mac

It explains the issue and the fix. After a few weeks of pulling my hair out, this seems to have fixed things even if it does slow down the render. Go to FILE, PROJECT SETTINGS, GENERAL, and change the render mode to SOFTWARE.

Good luck and let's hope that Apple, AMD, and Adobe can all get things on the same page soon.

Report · Jun 09, 2014

I recently upgraded to 10.9.3 and started having these problems after having no problems at all... restored my system to 10.9.2... problems solved... not quite sure what Apple have done here... seems rare for a dot release to have such a dramatic effect... if you can get 10.9.2 ruining your system I think you will have a much better time of it.

Pete

Mac Pro – 8 cores – 32GB RAM – 2 x D700 AMD video cards