Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows | TechCrunch:
“These aren’t necessarily always fundamental performance issues,” notes Ternus. “These aren’t things that you’d find in a benchmark or an automated test flow. You know we have examples where we find something like it’s…a window that a 3D animator uses frequently to make some fine fine tweaks. The windows are not super graphically intensive in terms of processing and stewing but we have found an issue where that window was taking like 6 to 10 seconds to open and they’re doing that 100 times a day, right? Like ‘I can’t work on a machine like this, It’s too slow’ so we dig in and we figure out what it was.
I have a late 2015 iMac with a quad core i7 and 4Ghz clock speed, a Radeon 395x with I think 4GB of VRAM and 32GB of DDR3 memory. I have 750 gigabytes of 4K video living on the iMac locally from my trip last week and I gave the iMac 2 full days to completely transcode the footage into a usable format on the latest version of Final Cut Pro. I should repeat that. It took 48 hours to transcode my videos to a usable format that I could edit.
Editing this footage is a huge patience exercise. A simple blade cut a 1 minute clip and the entire wave form of the audio in the visible time line takes 5 seconds to visualize again and playback won’t resume or drop 20 of 29 frames a second until the waveform visualizes again. I’ve walked away from my iMac on 5 different occasions with anger and returned only to visit Dell.com to see what they are charging for computers these days. My 18 month old $3,100 Macintosh can’t edit footage off a GoPro. I have little faith that a $7500 iMac Pro would fare any better. There are no filters, color, audio gradients or such applied. This is linear single shot GoPro that I’m simply trimming / blade cutting with some flat text over it. I’m not making Spiderman.
It is truly despicable and I HOPE this is something they’re addressing because as it sits, my disk, RAM, GPU and CPUs on the iMac aren’t running at full speed. They’re not being fully utilized by a 1st party piece of Software on HEVC which Apple completely supports in FCP. I really hope this improves.