Our three new Mac Pros are up and running! And after a full week of use, we have our Production Manager, Josh, here to give us his first impressions - the good and the bad.

Video Transcript

Hey everybody, my name is Josh Kuss, and I am the Production Manager for PEG. For a very long time now, we've been working on older hardware. We're a Mac environment, and we've been holding out for the elusive new Mac Pros.

Today, I'm happy to say our patience paid off, and we finally got our hands on three new Mac Pros. I can't stress enough how exciting this is for us. In my four years at PEG, our systems have slowly gotten more and more outdated. But we continued to hear the rumors about the new Mac Pros, and we decided to wait — and we are really glad we did.

Thankfully, they are everything we could have wanted and more. So we wanted to do a quick first impressions video that highlights a few of our favorite things about the new systems, along with some things we hope to see improved.

Let’s get to it.

The first thing we did when we got the new systems set up was run some well-known benchmarks. Since their release, we've seen these benchmarks quite a bit, so I won't go into a ton of detail. But I do have to say — I love seeing the Cinebench score as high as it is.

We work on Maxon Cinema 4D often, for sports and corporate 3D projects, so seeing how well the new Mac Pros handle Maxon makes me very excited for our next 3D project. Another impressive metric is the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, which showed nearly 3,000 megabytes per second read and write speed to the internal SSD.

All three of our systems have the 28-core Intel Xeon W processors, with some variation in memory and GPUs. For instance, the benchmarks were done on the system behind me, which has the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics card, while the others have the base Radeon Pro 580X. This system also has 96 GB of RAM, while the others have the base 32 GB.

All right — with the impressive benchmarks out of the way, let's jump into our likes and dislikes.

The first thing we love about these systems is the possibility of upgrading them in the future. Not a ton to say there, but just knowing that as time passes and new hardware comes out, we'll be able to keep upgrading these systems to handle extensive video edits — including 5K, 6K, and hopefully even 8K footage — is really exciting.

One feature that makes upgrading even more exciting is how easy Apple has made it to access the interior parts of the computer and work on them. With a simple twist and pull, you can remove the outer case of the computer and access whatever you might need to work on — whether it's memory upgrades or GPU upgrades.

Just be very careful not to have any cables plugged into the back when removing the case. We're not sure if it was an intentional design choice — maybe to prevent people from having power connected during maintenance — or just a minor oversight. Either way, unplug everything first, or risk damaging some very expensive connections on the GPU and motherboard.

The last thing we're really excited about is the major difference in power with these new Mac Pros. Compared to our previous systems, we're seeing amazing increases in performance in most of our editing applications.

We've seen crazy speeds out of Final Cut for some RED 5K footage transcodes to ProRes. Then we ran that same RED footage in DaVinci and got even crazier speeds. But sadly, where we're seeing the least improvement so far is in Adobe applications — which is actually what we prefer to use for editing.

The reason is that Adobe applications are not optimized to use more than eight cores of a processor. In some rendering scenarios, they may only use one core. In a one-to-one render test, Final Cut was actually able to render a one-minute 5K R3D file to ProRes two to five times faster than Premiere. DaVinci rendered that same clip twenty times faster than Premiere.

So that's upsetting.

We've done other tests with very similar results, and we aren't super happy about that. The strength of the systems we purchased lies in the 28-core processors, and it looks like — for now — they might be wasted on Premiere Pro.

We don’t know if that's something Adobe is actively working on, but we're putting in some time with support and researching the issue to see if any workarounds exist. For now, because Final Cut and DaVinci seem so well optimized, we're probably going to do our large transcodes in those, and continue doing our major edits in Premiere so we can still use features we love — like Dynamic Link from After Effects.

If you're an editor watching this and you have any workflows you prefer, feel free to leave them in the comments. I love seeing how other people are doing things, so let’s start the discussion.

Well, that's all I have for you right now. We've actually only had these monsters for about a week, so we plan on doing a full review later on. It might be a blog, it might be a video — but keep your eyes peeled for that.

And as always, if you enjoy PEG’s content, check out our social media accounts so you can stay up to date with all the fun stuff we do.