By Zack Schnepf
For those waiting for the review of the Sony A7r, I’m still working on it. I will finally receive the 24-70 Ziess lens this week. When I do, I can really start testing this camera. My initial impression is about what I expected, fantastic image quality, but poor auto focusing. I’ll elaborate in my next blog.
2014 Mac Pro:
When I saw the product demonstration for the new Mac Pro last summer, I was really excited. It had been years since Apple had released a significant update of their pro desktop line and I was starting to consider switching platforms or getting an iMac. Finally, last summer Apple unveiled a radically redesigned machine and I was pretty excited with what I saw. I do a lot of high end processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, and do a lot of video editing as well. This machine looked to be a perfect match for these demanding tasks, but would it live up to the hype?
The Hype. You can see the official Mac Pro page here for all the details of this machine: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
I liked what I saw right away. I loved the new unified thermal core design, it allows for a much smaller machine and is extremely quiet, using just one fan to cool the entire system. This is impressive, but even more impressive are the components used in this machine. This is a very forward thinking machine. It uses top of the line Xeon E5 processors (up to 12 cores), dual FirePro graphics processors, DDR3 ECC Ram(up to 64 gigs), PCI based flash storage, and a host of IO ports including 4 USB 3 ports, 6 thunderbolt ports, 2 ethernet ports and an HDMI 1.4. This all sounded great, but I needed to see it for myself?
I wanted to build the ultimate machine for processing photos and video. Here are the options I decided on:
Processor: 3.5 GHz 6-Core Xeon E5
Memory: 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram
Graphics: AMD dual FirePro D500s, 3GB VRam each
Storage: 500GB PCIe based flash storage
It took a few months to get here, but I’ve now had this computer for a few weeks. Here are my initial impressions. This is an absolute beast of a machine. I’ve been blown away by the speed of every task I’ve thrown at this machine! Much of this has to do with upgrading to a solid-state boot drive. The computer starts up incredibly fast, about 6-7 seconds, compared to several minutes on my last 2009 Mac Pro. Applications launch very quickly, even apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, and Final Cut Pro X launch in a second or two. Not only that, with 32 gigs of fast Ram I never have to worry about how many applications I have running at once. Even while doing some heavy lifting, like processing multiple 36 megapixel files in Photoshop, this computer continues to blaze away at startling speed with silky smooth performance.
The Dual GPUs come in handy for me using FCPX, Motion, and high FPS video playback. The new version of OSX, Mavericks can also leverage the GPUs to help speed system intensive tasks. You can see some amazing performance editing 4k video in real time using Final Cut Pro X here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-myFXiEh2Q
Only a few applications are fully optimized to take advantage this right now, but hopefully apps like Photoshop, and Lightroom will take advantage of this soon. Even without being optimized I’m seeing huge performance increases in all tasks.
One issue I have, is not with this computer, but apple in general. Not many displays use thunderbolt yet, and even with adapters, my 30” Dell would not work at full resolution. Eventually I want to move to a 4k display, but not until they support 60 FPS, and will work with thunderbolt. For now I’m using an Apple 27” thunderbolt display. Despite some terrible reviews I’ve read about this monitor I’m actually quite pleased. The reflective surface is my only real gripe. This can be a big problem for a lot of people. Luckily for me, my office has good lighting to avoid any glare. The image quality is very good, and once I calibrated it, the color is as good as anything I’ve used so far.
External storage: Because of the tiny form factor of this computer there is no room for internal storage drives except for the PCIe based flash solid state drive. I have several external thunderbolt drives totally almost 20 terabytes of space including backup drives. So far the speeds over thunderbolt are fantastic and I have no complaints at all.
Price: This is not a cheap machine. The configuration I built added up to around $5000. I’m sure I could build a comparable PC for a bit less, but the user experience in OSX is worth the premium to me. I know there are people who are more technical than I am who can build a hackintosh for less as well, but this is such a well designed machine. I have no regrets at all.
This computer is overkill for a lot of people. Many would be much better off with an iMac with a solid state drive, or a Macbook Pro, or a comparable PC. I’ve always pushed my computers to the limit, I like to run several system intensive programs at once. I’m also increasingly busy. For me the new Mac Pro is going to save me a lot of time, and less time in front of the computer is more time out in the field and with my family and friends. I’m extremely pleased. The Mac Pro lived up to the hype and in my case exceeded my expectations.
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