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Dec 21, 2016 - Max Yuryev, a professional video editor, benchmarks the new 2016 MacBook Pro vs the 2015 MacBook Pro thoroughly to see if it is worth.
Click to expand.I have a similar machine except mine has the M370X GPU. In GeekBench 4.x, the difference in GPU performance is 37380 vs 29022, so it's a usable but not gigantic difference. A lot of video editing is not GPU-limited but CPU-limited, although many effects are GPU enabled. I edit H264 1080p and 4k video on my MBP and it does OK, but anytime you deal with 4k you normally will need to use proxy for best performance - even with FCPX. Premiere is somewhat slower on the same hardware, so in that case you definitely must use proxy.
Fortunately Adobe added this as a built-in feature in recent versions. For external storage, just don't use a slow, bus-powered USB 3.0 spinning drive - especially for 4k and certainly not for transcoded ProRes material. A Thunderbolt SSD drive would be ideal but they are more expensive. The USB 3.1 1TB Samsung T3 is pretty good. Click to expand.That is a custom order when you upgrade the processor only on the base model, and highly unlikely to be in circulation this soon after it was on sale.
However, as noted above, the Iris Pro 5200 has 1.5GB vram shared from the system ram of 16GB. This is far and away enough for editing 4k video files on an external 4k monitor. (The only significant point of difference as far as video goes for the iGPU only models vs the dGPU models is that the dGPU can drive a 5k display, which is unlikely to matter as the LG 5k is TB3 connected and is made for the 2016 MBP.). Click to expand.The information in that article is dated and no longer correct. The 2015 i7 iMac 27 encodes to single-pass H264 about 1.9x faster than a 12-core D700 Mac Pro.
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FCPX 10.3.4 in two-pass 'Better Quality' mode is about 1.8x slower than single-pass, so even the 2015 iMac in two-pass mode was faster than the 12-core nMP. The 2017 iMac 27 is about 2x faster than the 2015 model at H264 encode/decode, apparently due to Kaby Lake Quick Sync improvements. In rough terms it is nearly 4x faster than the 12-core nMP on this workload in single-pass mode, and roughly 2x faster in two-pass mode.
It is also much faster on the H264.decode. side, not just encoding. A very common workflow is transcoding H264 to ProRes proxy, which is mainly a decode task since ProRes encoding is less CPU intensive than H264. In this case there is no single pass vs two-pass decision: the algorithm is the same. On H264 to ProRes proxy transcoding, I recently tested a 12-core D700 Mac Pro vs a 2017 i7 iMac 27 using FCPX and the iMac was consistently about 3.5x faster on this task.