Performance is important

You can render Iray with a Mac, I still render out stills for the comic book I'm working on on my iMac currently when my PC is rendering shots for my animated film, but I have to keep the resolution below 1200x800 to have it render quicker, or if it's possible, I do it in layers and compile them all in Photoshop. Editing Platform Basics: Mac or PC? The Best For Complex Editing and Rendering on macOS. Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch. $2,079 at Amazon. See it The Best For From-the-Factory Color Calibration. For PC users, it's critically important to have a higher-end level of hardware in your editing computer. Video editing requires more horsepower. But because PC systems are usually purchased ala-carte, there's a wide range of hardware features and specifications you need to know about before you buy. We'll discuss these later. The Mac Pro is the Mac Pro that Apple should have introduced in 2013. It answers many of the wishes of creatives and video professionals with extremely powerful components and a more suitable design.

At BIZON we often get many customers who want to switch from a Mac to a PC Workstation. While there are many reasons our customers want a change, it usually comes down to one major factor, performance.

Whatever you use your Mac or Workstation PC for, performance is important to help you manage your workflow, to ensure your game runs smoothly, for high-quality sound and graphics, and to edit videos efficiently.

The rise in 4K, 6K, and 8K workflows makes optimum performance a necessity for many people, so it is essential to make the right choice when considering a computer.

With performance being the most important factor when deciding between a PC or a Mac, we take a look at why a PC is a better option to use Adobe’s Premiere Pro video editing application compared to a Mac or iMac Pro 2019.

To find out whether a PC or Mac is a best video editing workstation, we took three iMac systems and a PC workstation of a similar price and tested them across performance for live playback, render in to out, and export.

If you love data we’re sure you’ll enjoy looking at our charts, which show how the systems compare, but if charts aren’t your thing you can always scroll past the data to read our conclusion.

To compare the iMac Pro and Mac Pro to our BIZON V5000 4K/6K/8K video editing workstation, we tested the following system configurations, using Premier Pro version 13.1:

1. BIZON V5000 14-Core 4K/6K/8K Video Editing Workstation Computer 2020
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Price $5700 + $520 (4K monitor) = $6220 –> ~$6200

Processor: 14-Core 3.30 GHz Intel Core i9-9940X (up to 18 cores)
Memory: 64 GB DDR4 3200 MHz
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB
Note: With NVIDIA GPUs you get advantages of Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine acceleration and CUDA support. AMD that comes with Mac have no CUDA.
Hard Drive (Operating system): 1 TB PCI-E SSD (Up to 3500 Mb/s)
Additional HDD (Storage): 2 TB HDD SATA
Operating system: Windows 10 Pro
Monitor: Dell U2718Q 27-Inch 4K UHD IPS Monitor
Keyboard + Mouse: Logitech Wireless Mouse and Keyboard
Warranty: Life-time Expert Care with 5 Year Limited Warranty (5 Year Labor & 3 Year Part Replacement)
Software Premiere Pro CC 2019 (ver 13.1)

Price $7000 + $79 (mouse) + $129 (keyboard) + $520 (4K monitor) + $249 (Apple Care) = $7556 –> ~$7500

Processor: 2.7GHz 12-core Xeon
Note: Old generation CPU (2013 Year)
Memory: 64GB 1866MHz DDR3
Note: Old DDR3 RAM
Graphics Card: Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs 6GB
Hard Drive: 1TB PCIe-based SSD
Additional HDD (Storage): Not available
Operating System: macOS 10.13.4
Monitor: Dell U2718Q 27-Inch 4K UHD IPS Monitor
Keyboard + Mouse: Space Gray Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad + Magic Mouse 2
Warranty: AppleCare+ for Mac (3 yr limited warranty & telephone technical support)
Software: Premiere Pro CC 2019 (ver 13.1)

3. Apple iMac Pro 2019 (14-Core)
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Price $8000 + $169 (Apple Care) = $8169 –> ~8200

Processor: 2.5GHz 14-core Intel Xeon W processor
Memory: 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC
Graphics Card: Radeon Pro Vega 64 16GB
Hard Drive: 1TB PCIe SSD
Additional HDD (Storage): Not available
Operating System: macOS 10.13.4
Monitor: 27-inch LED-backlit 5K display
Keyboard + Mouse: Space Gray Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad + Magic Mouse 2
Warranty: AppleCare+ for iMac (3 yr limited warranty & telephone technical support)
Software: Premiere Pro CC 2019 (ver 13.1)

Price $7200 + $169 (Apple Care) = $7369 –> ~7400

Processor: 3.0GHz 10-core Intel Xeon W processor
Memory: 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC
Graphics Card: Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16GB
Hard Drive: 1TB PCIe SSD
Additional HDD (Storage): Not available
Operating System: macOS 10.13.4
Monitor: 27-inch LED-backlit 5K display
Keyboard + Mouse: Space Gray Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad + Magic Mouse 2
Warranty: AppleCare+ for iMac (3 yr limited warranty & telephone technical support)
Software: Premiere Pro CC 2019 (ver 13.1)

We used version 13.1 of Premiere Pro, as the latest version wasn’t released at the time of this article. We also found major performance issues with Premiere Pro CC 2019 (ver 13.1), with performance drops in ProRes footage on the PC and RED footage on the Mac when using versions 13.1 and 13.1.1.

For a fair comparison we kept the specs and pricing as similar as possible. For example, as Mac systems only support a single internal drive, we used a single 1TB PCI-E SSD drive on our BIZON Workstation PC, rather than multiple storage drives, which improve performance when generating peak files and importing media. As the iMac Pro requires a keyboard and mouse, we also bought a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for the Mac Pro and PC.

To compare the systems, we tested three different functions in Premiere Pro: live playback, export, and render in to out.

Although we didn’t cover every available codec, we covered a large number of RED clips so that we could really see how different compression levels impact performance. Our tests also used three different timelines to stimulate different types of workload.

Recording results

We recorded the export time from the moment the ‘Export’ button was clicked until completion. We also measured Live playback FPS (frames per second) based on the number of dropped frames relative to the total number of frames in the sequence. For example, by dropping 100 frames in the 4K ProRes 422 HQ 'Basic' timeline (which has 579 frames), you will render 479 frames over 24 seconds for a result of ~20 FPS.

We used Lumetri effects from the 'Lumetri Presets –> Speedlooks –> Universal' effects folder. However, if you’re using a Mac you’ll probably need to delete and re-apply the Lumetri Color effects, as sometimes they don’t translate properly from the PC to Mac.

It can be a challenge to accurately test live playback performance because performance depends on the codec and resolution of your media, as well as the playback resolution (full, half, etc.) and the effects you’ve applied.

At BIZON we often get asked about live playback performance, so we decided to test our media with three different timelines, as well as with a full and half playback resolution. We also decided to calculate the average performance of each system relative to the 10-core iMac Pro using OpenCL.

We found that using Metal with a Mac is a bad idea for playback performance and found a 20-30% drop in FPS with most of our test media, and a massive drop in FPS with RED footage when using Metal on the Mac system. For example, with 4K RED 11:1 footage the iMac Pro 14-core went from 24FPS to 6FPS without any effects being applied to the footage.

Even when using OpenCL you will get a bump in FPS with a PC. However, compared to the iMac-Pro 10-core, our PC workstation gave 25% higher FPS with ProRes media, 30% higher with DNxHR HQ/H.264/ARRIRAW, and almost 75% higher FPS with RED footage, and was 94% faster on average in our ‘Heavy Effects’ test.

In comparison, the 14-core iMac Pro did slightly better with RED footage and was about 10% faster than the 10-core iMac Pro. However, the PC workstation was the clear winner for playback performance and was 25-60% faster depending on the type of footage used; making our PC wo

Pc Or Mac For Rendering