WOW New 15inch Macbook no faster than Old 13 in Final Cut Pro.

[Stormbitch]

I demo'd a 15 inch MBP today in store.

It was the

Touch Bar and Touch ID
2.6GHz 6-Core Processor

• Radeon Pro 555X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory
• 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
• 256GB SSD storage

And I put it against my 1967 Macbook Pro

2015
2.9 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

The main issue I have is FCPX 10.3.1 - on my Old Pro its unusable when using 4k clips, and laggy in any FCPX projects that last around 8 mins or more EVEN WHEN TRANSCODING.


I plugged my USB 3 into the NEWEST mac to see how it might perform and opened the library in the shop. in their newer slicker FCPX 10.4.1

I noticed the same issues:

1. Delay when hitting space bar to play project. (Similar for both)
2. Delay when selecting the different view panes in FCPX i.e. show library, show effects etc.
3. Rendering was almost exactly the same speed.
4. 15 was marginally able to cope with playback of 4k.


Surely the 15 inch should race and be a noticably faster machine?????

Noting that 32gb wont make any diff to FCPX I was shocked I could have spent £2345 approx on a machine that would not be much better. Certainly to me - even the guy in the Mac Store was like "Oh, these two machines look to be performing about the same"

And where did £3k for a better MPB suddenly come from, have we gone to another planet!

 

[flyespresso]

I demo'd a 15 inch MBP today in store.

It was the

Touch Bar and Touch ID
2.6GHz 6-Core Processor

• Radeon Pro 555X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory
• 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
• 256GB SSD storage

And I put it against my 1967 Macbook Pro

2015
2.9 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

The main issue I have is FCPX 10.3.1 - on my Old Pro its unusable when using 4k clips, and laggy in any FCPX projects that last around 8 mins or more EVEN WHEN TRANSCODING.


I plugged my USB 3 into the NEWEST mac to see how it might perform and opened the library in the shop. in their newer slicker FCPX 10.4.1

I noticed the same issues:

1. Delay when hitting space bar to play project. (Similar for both)
2. Delay when selecting the different view panes in FCPX i.e. show library, show effects etc.
3. Rendering was almost exactly the same speed.
4. 15 was marginally able to cope with playback of 4k.


Surely the 15 inch should race and be a noticably faster machine?????

Noting that 32gb wont make any diff to FCPX I was shocked I could have spent £2345 approx on a machine that would not be much better. Certainly to me - even the guy in the Mac Store was like "Oh, these two machines look to be performing about the same"

And where did £3k for a better MPB suddenly come from, have we gone to another planet!

This is a flawed test, FCPX is highly dependent on GPU, storage speed & what file system the drive is formatted. Not the resolution of the files (say 1080p, 4K, 8K).

Using an external, USB3 drive, to work off of will slow it down and make it overall laggy. If this is the same drive you work off on your older machine, I bet it'd be faster with a Thunderbolt connected SSD. 4K is incredibly taxing from a storage perspective, even a 550 MB/s USB3 SSD won't in all cases be fast enough for you to edit with no delay. Further, is your catalogs cache on the external drive or internal? If it's internal, but your project is external, the machine you're trying it on is having to re-cache/render everything. Perhaps copy it to the demo machine and verify the cache/library settings.

I haven't loaded any projects on my new 2019 13" i7 equipped MBP, but the Black Magic speed test is giving me 2750 MB/s Read 2550 MB/s Write. It's amazing! I've had no issue doing 4K edits on a 2015 12" Macbook (YES, MACBOOK) with FCPX while on a trip.

FCPX scales really, really, well to non-beastly hardware. Adobe Premier Pro? Not so much...

 

[buran-energia]

If it's not faster, then you're doing something wrong (e.g. the reason is USB 3.0 drive).

 

[Stormbitch]

Thanks for taking the time mate v much.

What is Beastly hardware?

Secondly is the Transcend 1TB not an SSD? I though it was....it has a up to 10gb ps speed and is using thunderbolt.

Transcend its formatted to Mac.

How long where your 4k edits and where were the libraries and clips stored?

 

[nicho]

Secondly is the Transcend 1TB not an SSD? I though it was....it has a up to 10gb ps speed and is using thunderbolt.

You need to decide if it is using USB3 or thunderbolt. They're not the same thing.

I suspect from what you've said you have the model with both USB3 and Thunderbolt (1) ports. How did you attach it to the in-store mac which doesn't have either of the ports that the included cables fit into? If you used a USBC cable, it's not using the thunderbolt interface. Even if it were, it'll be nowhere near as fast as the SSD in the new machine. In fact, I'd hazard that it will still be significantly slower than the internal SSD in your 2015 MBP. IIRC that's when they really ramped up the speeds vs my 2013/2014 models.

 

[leman]

Did you copy the files to Mac or where you opening them from the USB drive? If the later, we’ll, that’s your problem just there.

 

[jerryk]

Think of it as a water hose. You put a kink in the hose by using a USB 3 external drive. Copy those test files to the new system's internal drive and rerun your test.

 

[Stormbitch]

Right - thanks very much guys so far this is very interesting - the Mac bloke at the shop knows less than you lot then it seems!!!!

I doubt they would let me do that in the shop but does make sense. That said, everything I read says NEVER edit on the machine running the software unless its a massive machine. I started using the SSD external and all my original problems went away.

In the short term for my current machine. Would a much faster external make the difference then? If so what sort of numbers should I be looking at for read speed or transfer speed?

My Transcend is wierdly:

Up to 440MB/s read; 300MB/s write - but it says transfer rates of up to 10 GB/s - - makes no sense to me but then I am not the genuis here.

I looked on the fc forum and that stuff is properly advanced raid stuff.

 

[nicho]

Up to 440MB/s read; 300MB/s write - but it says transfer rates of up to 10 GB/s - - makes no sense to me but then I am not the genuis here.

Think of Thunderbolt like a motorway and your particular SSD like a bicycle. Just because you can't reach 70mph doesn't mean the speed limit isn't 70mph - but it's still theoretical.

How big is the SSD on your current laptop that it stops you from using it effectively? The internal SSD in the new MBP is faster than your internal one and a lot faster than the external one you have right now. Like literally up to 8x faster.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

If you want to work on via an external connection you gotta use something like an external SSD as in Samsung T5.

Using a normal USB connection to an 5400RPM disc is gonna be heck of a slow one.

 

[jerryk]

Right - thanks very much guys so far this is very interesting - the Mac bloke at the shop knows less than you lot then it seems!!!!

I doubt they would let me do that in the shop but does make sense. That said, everything I read says NEVER edit on the machine running the software unless its a massive machine. I started using the SSD external and all my original problems went away.

In the short term for my current machine. Would a much faster external make the difference then? If so what sort of numbers should I be looking at for read speed or transfer speed?

My Transcend is wierdly:

Up to 440MB/s read; 300MB/s write - but it says transfer rates of up to 10 GB/s - - makes no sense to me but then I am not the genuis here.

I looked on the fc forum and that stuff is properly advanced raid stuff.

Current internal drives SSD drives on a 2018 macBook Pro 15 can achieve transfer rates of over 3,000 MB/sec read or write for big files with a 2TB drive. While smaller size drives would be a little slower , but they will be over 2,000 MB/sec. The internal drives are blazing fast.

 

[Howard2k]

Up to 440MB/s read; 300MB/s write - but it says transfer rates of up to 10 GB/s - -

You're also conflating GB/s and Gb/s.
USB3 is 10Gb/s, which is (only) 1.25GB/s, or 1,025MB/s.

Your drive is probably up to (depending on file structure) 440MB/s and 300MB/s. So at best, around 1/3rd of the available bandwidth.

As Jerryk notes, the MBPro internal SSD will do close to 10x the speed of your SSD.

It's not like it's a little faster. Or even twice as fast. It's almost 10x the speed.

 

[nicho]

You're also conflating GB/s and Gb/s.
USB3 is 10Gb/s, which is (only) 1.25GB/s, or 1,025MB/s.

Your drive is probably up to (depending on file structure) 440MB/s and 300MB/s. So at best, around 1/3rd of the available bandwidth.

As Jerryk notes, the MBPro internal SSD will do close to 10x the speed of your SSD.

It's not like it's a little faster. Or even twice as fast. It's almost 10x the speed.

The 10Gbps number comes from the Thunderbolt port. USB 3.0 is 5Gbps.

 

[FFR]

If you want to work on via an external connection you gotta use something like an external SSD as in Samsung T5.

Using a normal USB connection to an 5400RPM disc is gonna be heck of a slow one.

T5 is only up to 540MB/s.

If you want a fast external ssd get a lacie Bolt with speeds of up to 2800MB/s.

Now that drive is fast.

 

[Howard2k]

The 10Gbps number comes from the Thunderbolt port. USB 3.0 is 5Gbps.

Quite correct!

 

[flyespresso]

Current internal drives SSD drives on a 2018 macBook Pro 15 can achieve transfer rates of over 3,000 MB/sec read or write for big files with a 2TB drive. While smaller size drives would be a little slower , but they will be over 2,000 MB/sec. The internal drives are blazing fast.

Woah, the 2TB internal is faster than the 1TB internal on the MBP's? I didn't know that at all–Hmm, maybe I will swap the 1TB machine I got with a 2TB. I was just going to get a couple TB3 NVMe drives for different projects
[doublepost=1559011532][/doublepost]

Right - thanks very much guys so far this is very interesting - the Mac bloke at the shop knows less than you lot then it seems!!!!

I doubt they would let me do that in the shop but does make sense. That said, everything I read says NEVER edit on the machine running the software unless its a massive machine. I started using the SSD external and all my original problems went away.

In the short term for my current machine. Would a much faster external make the difference then? If so what sort of numbers should I be looking at for read speed or transfer speed?

My Transcend is wierdly:

Up to 440MB/s read; 300MB/s write - but it says transfer rates of up to 10 GB/s - - makes no sense to me but then I am not the genuis here.

I looked on the fc forum and that stuff is properly advanced raid stuff.

The suggestions of not editing on the machine is hold-overs from the era of spinning disks. Not our current world where SSD's–to which there is different standards–are the norm. They are absolutely gangbusters compared to a spinning disk with greater reliability and lower latency.

By non-beastly, I mean a machine that isn't a top-spec Mac Pro. Length of a project also does not impact performance one bit. It's all bit-rate, what you're doing adjustment wise (are you color grading and using overlays? Are you stabilizing?).

 

[jerryk]

Woah, the 2TB internal is faster than the 1TB internal on the MBP's? I didn't know that at all–Hmm, maybe I will swap the 1TB machine I got with a 2TB. I was just going to get a couple TB3 NVMe drives for different projects

This is true regardless of brand of computer or SSD. Larger SSDs allow more parallel reads and writes. This is why I run one 2 TB NVMe drive in my desktop machine instead of 2 1 TB.

But, don't overspend. The difference is 2,300 MB/sec vs. 3,000 MB/sec. These are both are blazing fast. And may inside an application make little performance difference, since the application needs to process the data once it is read from the ssd.

 

[flyespresso]

This is true regardless of brand of computer or SSD. Larger SSDs allow more parallel reads and writes. This is why I run one 2 TB NVMe drive in my desktop machine instead of 2 1 TB.

But, don't overspend. The difference is 2,300 MB/sec vs. 3,000 MB/sec. These are both are blazing fast. And may inside an application make little performance difference, since the application needs to process the data once it is read from the ssd.

It's true at lower sizes, typically below ~512GB once you're above that it's limited by the controller/connection. Where have you seen a benchmark on the size difference on the MBP? I just was curious as I hadn't seen anything specifically for that.

 

[fhturner]

For the benefit of someone else reading this thread later...

@Stormbitch, I hope your lack of further posting here means you got this figured out. Would be great if you posted back to let us know. But there’s something else going on here. There seems to be quite a bit of concern over the raw transfer rate of the external SSDs and interfaces. The OP’s Transcend SSD, whether USB3 or TB, should be perfectly fine for handling his video files. 500MB/s vs 3000MB/s is NOT going to make a difference that Stormbitch would notice as extremely sluggish performance and response from FCPX.

I could have missed it, but I didn’t see any mention of the specific camera/codec/data rate of the 4K footage. This could have a huge impact, depending on what those specs are. However, if you’re working on fairly run-of-the-mill H.264 4K footage straight from the camera, your disk external performance is not going to impose any sort of meaningful bottleneck on that. A camera might typically record 4K H.264 at 100 or 150Mbps. That’s only 12-18MB/s...nowhere near the 400MB/s read speeds SB mentions.

So, something else is up. And I think we’d have to know more about the camera/codec before going much further. Maybe it’s something like Canon C200 Lite RAW or RED RAW at a low compression ratio, which are demanding, and that’s choking both systems. Both of these could be overwhelming the CPU, for example. But the chances that his USB3 SSD is not cutting it where a TB SSD would be are very slim...