Apple NBP w/ retina

[kloner]

Since getting into this cinematography side of biz i was wanting to get a laptop with balls that makes doing this less painful to deal with transferring files. I've never bought a laptop and have built my own windows desktops since there has been windows. Always though they were so expensive, and doing video work the apple was the obvious choice. A few weeks ago i bought an apple note book pro with 15" retina, the newest one that just came out and filled it with every option..... $3500 later, i got an incredible pc, lemme tell ya. It has thunderbolt and transfers files to graid drives via thunderbird up to 800mb/s, on the usb port she's running about 380mb/s....... on my 2 year old intel built to the hill desktop transfers 20-30mb/s on a good day. A premier, OMG, I wasted days of my life screwing around with a pc and premier. things that took minutes on pc take seconds, what took hours takes minutes, it's incredible..... Guess as long as i'm alive, i'll own an apple computer. The display is off the hook, there isn't a pixel to be found no matter what you do, and the view angle is everywhere, no dark sides,,,,,,because i'm also a model builder, i obviously need windows...... yep, has it. has an app called bootcamp that lets you partition the hard drive into however many you want and you can instal windows..... every app i've tried is working for tuning multi rotors and gimbals. $70 got me windows 7 pro...... super light, runs 8 hours on a charge. I'm a fan, highly recommended

 

[DennyR]

My edit suits based on Mac pros are now obsolete, or are they. The latest MacBookPro 15"retina is the most powerful computer that I have ever owned. What I find the most useful is to be able to do a complex composite effect and then watch it straight away as you scrub the time line without all that rendering that took forever. FCP-X can do everything that you will probably ever need and it is cheap at 299 usd. You may find however that the 3500 usd for the machine is just the start because none of my old software would load on 10.9 Mavericks. Things like Photoshop for instance.... So those old machines do still have a roll to play as back-ups that run perfectly good stuff that they call obsolete and no longer supported. Scanners, printers and that kind of stuff.
For decades the industry standard for international publishing has been Quark Express and then In-Design started to creep in as a simpler and cheaper alternative. Holy **** this thing comes with a free copy of Pages that can do it all without the dongled difficult to use status symbol.

 

[kloner]

I opted to do the adobe cloud route and it's all monthly fee based but the latest greatest version of anything adobe. I've always wondered if doing it on yearly contracts is more or less than staying up to date with the latest adobe offerings.

amazing computer though, never seen something so fast. turn it on and it's on... save and it's saved.... never waiting is spoiling me off my windows pc..... I can even run my windows pc from it through remote desktop. They got every bell and whistle in there and it all works.

 

[DennyR]

I thought about that because I don't think Adobe are supporting any of the older stuff now. If you have to reinstall then you have basically had it, even to get it back to where you were. In five years time I expect that I wont care but when our machines become obsolete we will all need cloud based commitments to get the job done.

 

[ChrisViperM]

The facts about the MacBook Pro Retina sound great, but how do you guys cope with that stamp-sized 15" screen......??? For me my 24" iMac screen is already getting small when doing a few things at the same time.


Chris

 

[kloner]

they got a sick 27" monitor that is stackable. http://www.apple.com/displays/

I'm using apple tv and a 60" wide screen or just the monitor on the road. that, bluetooth mouse i'm in business.....

the regular monitor is big area wise, 2880x1800 res, nvidia 2 gig video card.......the i7 2.6 with 16g of ram, it's a horse. The keyboard is small, but backlit. At least i can feel the keys vs the microsoft keyboard i'm used to. two thumbs and two big toes up!!!

 

[DucktileMedia]

I'm hesitant to jump in on this conversation but since I have all of the above, i will. First off I love macs and HATE pc's. but comparing a 5+ year old PC to a new mac is no different than comparing it to a new PC. Where apple excels is in its OS and build quality of enclosures. No viruses(as of yet) less confusion, updates are easy, things just make more sense and dont tend to crash as much. having said that, I need way more crunch than a macbook pro can offer. If you guys are talking about editing video, then the i7 is great. But if you are talking about true compositing, there is NO computer powerful enough to be real time. I, like many, were hoping the new Mac Pro(not the stinking laptop) would be another versatile beast of a machine. but instead they chose to go with a proprietary overpriced trash can looking fan. I'm sure it will be fast but at the cost of not having any internal drives, built in GPU's and needing to repurchase all the external drives and peripherals to thunderbolt compliant devices. I personally like my large aluminum "pro" looking enclosure. Anyone who uses AE, c4d,3dmax, maya, nuke, etc. knows that there is no such thing as enough ram and cores. every time you make a change the clip has to re-render to see what you did. This can take an enormous amount of time when you have particles, complex geometry and a stack of compositions all working simultaneously. I'm actually thinking of perhaps going hackintosh or getting the latest full size MP. That new trash can MP will cost you $10-18k by the time you are upgraded on 12 cores. A similarly built PC enclosure with 16 cores will cost well under $10k. My prediction is that the complexity of building a reliable hackintosh will be greatly reduced by the amount of po'd vfx artists rebelling against apple's decision to go tiny and proprietary. As for monitors, I tried 2 24" monitors and ultimately liked 1 30" more since there always seems to be a lack of vertical space on a side by side system. It is also annoying having 2 monitors when you use other apps that dont really need them, I alway feel wasteful and it truthfully gave me a headache. 30" is great because you still have plenty of timeline on the bottom and a nice preview screen with a perfect amount of tool space on the sides. but that's just my personal preference.

I realize you are not asking about the MP and simply stating how great the MBP is but just wanted to throw in my $.02 as not even the dell precision mobile workstations can compete with a half loaded desktop. What I will be curious to see as well will be how Adobe decides to address Apple's move to AMD and how the CUDA real time rendering works in PP. I do have a CUDA compliant card in my MP and it is great having the GPU take on the majority of the tasks. AE I dont think matters for CUDA, that really relies on raw cores and ram. And trust me you can NEVER have enough RAM! 16 Gb is enough for 8-15 seconds or less of rendered preview for my typical compositions. It sucks! next computer will be a minimum of 12 cores with maxed ram.

 

[anaka]

Hi Kloner

I work in cinema and tv productions, I do VFX with 3d software, post production and other...I have more than 10 years of experience
if you are looking for a really powerful portable workstation, something that runs as fast as a desktop workstation but has the freedom of a standard laptop
your choice is a DELL product

If you want to know more just PM me

 

[DennyR]

I have workstations all over the place and I don't need them to do what is in the future. When I go to see a client I need a retina display laptop. I can make changes to the timeline and see it immediately the scrubber passes over it and show the client what he wants there and then. CGI I give to the pros. in London these days. Mocha is probably the only other software that interests me.

 

[yeehaanow]

Kloner, you should have a look at Parallels to run windows from within the mac OS. I used to use Bootcamp, but going back and forth is a pain, and so is copying files. On my older MPB I can run realflight at just about the highest settings in Parallels, all while running itunes in the mac OS. And no need to install drivers and mouse settings...etc. It picks it up from the mac settings. Makes life easier when you just need to plug in to adjust a little setting on the gimbal, flight control, whatever. Easily worth the $80.

I used to do all my editing on the laptop with another full HD screen plugged in. It does just fine until you want to do any motion graphics. Great little computers.

 

[yeehaanow]

The facts about the MacBook Pro Retina sound great, but how do you guys cope with that stamp-sized 15" screen......??? For me my 24" iMac screen is already getting small when doing a few things at the same time.
Chris

For editing, dual monitors is the only way to go for me.
But even with the 17" MBP, the screen resolution at full HD makes for everything to be a very small size and it's hard to setup in a position next to a big monitor where the details don't get lost. I never really found a good solution for that.

 

[DennyR]

The facts about the MacBook Pro Retina sound great, but how do you guys cope with that stamp-sized 15" screen......??? For me my 24" iMac screen is already getting small when doing a few things at the same time.


Chris

Chris
I use a 60 " flat screen TV with surround sound as MBP has an HDMI port. I can also switch it to the other computers that I have on the network. Many of my developer clients use this same output in the showrooms so it is a good way to test the quality control. Another useful device that I use with my still imaging laptop is a rotating monitor so that I can view portrait in full screen mode. About 50 T-bytes of raid is also useful. A Digi-Beta tape deck is also a must have as many TV producers are still using it in Europe.

 

[DennyR]

For editing, dual monitors is the only way to go for me.
But even with the 17" MBP, the screen resolution at full HD makes for everything to be a very small size and it's hard to setup in a position next to a big monitor where the details don't get lost. I never really found a good solution for that.

With FCP-X you can selectively enlarge parts of the viewer screen to 600% which I find is more than enough for detail analysis. Once you have used FCP-X you don't go back to 7 etc. IMHO. I have a few 20" Macpro screens surplus to requirements if anyone is interested.