Any Premiere Pro users?

ajf · 15 Apr 2013 at 23:30

As per my other posts I have been asked to look into some new Macs.
One of the uses will be for Premiere Pro. I do not personally use this.
Final output as 1080p of varying lengths upto 30mins.

Couple of questions.
Firstly with the CPU. The iMac has the option of i5 or i7. For this software is the i7 of any significant benefit? The main difference is the hyperthreading I think?

Secondly, graphics.
I understand the rendering can be accelerated with suitable CUDA cards. The options seem to be 675mx and 680mx. How much improvement does the higher spec card give?
*edit* In fact can anyone confirm if support for these cards has been added to Premiere yet? I have since found the 'MX' versions may not work for accelerated performance.

Any other comments or feedback re the software and spec?
HDD will be the standard 1Tb and will have 16Gb RAM.

Thanks

bloodiedathame · 16 Apr 2013 at 10:21

I use CS6 Master Collection daily, though not necessarily Premiere.

I believe that the i7 will be a better bet than i5, as far as I remember most of the applications do use hyperthreading now.

You are partially correct on the graphics front, CUDA cards can help, and I think most Nvidia GPUs can be made to work. There usually needs to be a bit of fiddling though, by means of adding your card to a supported cards text file. The enabling of CUDA allows some supported effects to work in real time (blurs etc). That said, I think that OpenCL for ATI cards, though doesn't enable real time effects with certain effects, really doesn't hold back the applications. I'm on an ATI card machine and use AE every day and it's fine, I wouldn't really notice a difference with a CUDA enabled card 99% of the time.

If I were you I would have a Thunderbolt external SSD (minimum 256GB) for applications and cache. I'd use the 1TB internal for User accounts (including capture scratch etc).

ajf · 17 Apr 2013 at 09:13

Thank you for that.
Interesting note about the SSD though.
Do you think it would be more beneficial to spend on this rather than the higher specced 680MX graphics?
There is an 'official' 256Gb one on the Apple site from Lacie.

Incidentally, had a further look around and it does look like, as you say, this card and most other CUDAs can be enabled. I guess there is just a risk it may not work as expected after buying!

bloodiedathame · 17 Apr 2013 at 10:49

Personally I'm happy to let renders run overnight, so I don't really worry too much about what GPU I run, I don't ever expect real time effects. CS6 is pretty good at displaying video at varying resolutions for playback (ie 50% size at half res). Naturally the better card will help render and playback but I don't know how noticeable a difference you'd see between cards.

Whatever happens Premiere will work, and as with most programmes, you'll adapt your workflow to suit whatever your spec is.

I've heard good things about the Lacie SSDs.