- PC versus Mac.
It's that age-old debate on which one is better.
When it comes to video editing, Mac gets a lot of attention
for being efficient and optimized, and PC gets the title
for best bang for buck power and customization.
But which is right for what situations,
and just how does the efficiency of a Mac
compare to a desktop PC's power?
Well, we take that to the extreme and compare
an old MacBook Pro against a new
high-spec PC for video editing in this video.
(steady electronic music)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help entrepreneurs and business owners
amplify their business and brand with video.
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and all the links to everything we mention in this video
you can find linked in the description box below.
So let's jump into it.
Now before we get stuck into the details here,
we do know that this is a sensitive topic,
so I just wanna frame it up a little bit
before the haters have at it in the comments.
Up until a few years ago, I was 100% a desktop PC guy.
I come from an IT background, have an IT degree,
and I've worked in computer shops
and all sorts of nerdy stuff.
Then I started traveling a lot more for work
and editing on the go, and good battery life
became an absolute necessity.
So at that point, I purchased a MacBook Pro,
which surprisingly ended up replacing most of my work
on desktop computers.
I love the idea of having one computer,
the MacBook Pro, that I could do everything on,
or good enough that I could take anywhere
and work from anywhere.
So while this has been good enough for a lot of my needs,
even working on some major documentaries
and some pretty large-scale projects on this MacBook Pro,
it's definitely no video editing powerhouse
the moment that you leave Final Cut Pro.
We're working with editors all the time
on different applications outside of just Final Cut Pro.
A big one for us is Adobe Premiere,
so that presents a bit of a challenge.
Just for example, even to make a minor change
to one of our weekly videos here that we're uploading
to YouTube, it could take up to two hours to save that
on my old MacBook Pro in Premiere,
whereas the same project, same computer,
same hard drives, the export would be
more like two to three minutes at the most in Final Cut.
In a lot of cases, the export would be absolutely instant.
So the biggest drawback, though, in my opinion
is the way that you work with external editors in Premiere
is way better than the workflow in Final Cut Pro.
So if you've watched any videos online,
including ours, then this isn't new.
You've likely heard that Macs can be incredibly efficient
when it comes to video editing,
and a lot of that comes down to the hardware
and software optimization.
But you're probably also aware
that you can get significantly higher-spec
desktop PCs or Windows laptops for much less than you pay
for a MacBook Pro.
So if video editing is your main purpose,
which one should you choose if you could only pick one,
and just how efficient is the Mac for video editing
when you take the whole power differential to the extreme
on a PC and stack an old MacBook Pro
against a brand-new, high-specced PC?
We recently got a new desktop editing PC
to handle our Adobe Premiere projects,
and I ran some benchmarks against my older 2014 MacBook Pro
to find out how the two stacked up,
and just how optimized the Mac really is in comparison.
And yes, before you head down the comments,
you are completely right.
This is not a strictly fair benchmark comparison.
We're comparison a laptop to a desktop,
but not only that; we're comparing an older model laptop
to a brand-new desktop.
But all of this helps to illustrate the point
that it's not just about the hardware and power.
Your focus should be on the end results,
and the right call for you
has a lot to do with the preferred workflow.
So here's what we've got.
On the Mac front, we've chosen to feature
my trusty old 2014 MacBook Pro.
It's definitely not the latest,
and it's not the greatest, but this thing has been awesome
since I got it back in 2014.
So it's the 15-inch mid-2014 model
with a 2.5 gigahertz Intel Core i7 processor.
It's got 16 gig of 1600 megahertz DDR3 RAM.
It's got a 512 gig SSD,
and the video card is an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M
with two gigabytes of memory.
And on the PC front, well,
you might say this is a loaded fight.
We've got a brand-new high-spec desktop PC.
This one was just sent out to us by MSI,
and it is an absolute beast.
It's got an Intel Core i7 8700K processor
which is clocked at 3.7 gigahertz
with a boost up to 4.7 gigahertz.
And it's the six-core model.
It's got 32 gig of Kingston RAM
clocked at 3,000 megahertz.
It's got a 256-gig Intel SSD, and it's also got
a four-terabyte Seagate Pro hard drive as well.
And for the video card, it's got an MSI NVIDIA GTX 1080,
the eight-gig GDDR5 model.
So looking at the specs alone,
that desktop looks hands-down to be the best option here,
and it certainly is for a lot of scenarios.
But let's check out some real-world benchmarks.
So for today's test, we're going to be looking
at a mix of software, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro,
and Da Vinci Resolve across both platforms.
So first off, just to give you an idea on the power
of the two systems, we ran Cinebench on each,
and these are the results.
The MacBook Pro got an OpenGL score
of 59.06 frames per second, a CPU score of 536,
and a single core CPU score of 130.
The beast of a desktop PC got an OpenGL score
of 130.58 frames per second, a CPU score of 1,399,
and a CPU single score of 183.
So you can see that there's a massive power
or performance difference between these two systems,
but make sure you stuck with us,
because things do get a little interesting as we progress.
Now, as for the actual video editing experience
in each of the software applications on both machines,
the MacBook Pro in Final Cut runs really, really well.
It is so optimized.
Everything is smooth.
Multiple layers of 4K video.
This thing will churn through
almost anything that you throw at it.
The same system, the MacBook Pro in Da Vinci Resolve
or Adobe Premiere is where this thing really struggles.
Even simple things like scrubbing through your timeline
or trying to play back without dropping any frames,
you've really gotta set these things
down to the lowest quality just to be able to do it,
and even in fairly basic editing projects
on both of these programs,
playback and overall editing smoothness,
it's just not there.
It is frustrating to edit in Adobe Premiere
or Da Vinci Resolve on this system.
Now, the PC video editing beast on the other hand
is a totally different story
in both Da Vinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere.
Clearly, it's designed to work better
with all of this extra hardware as well.
Even throwing some crazy timelines at these two programs,
both of them were amazing
at chewing through the video footage.
Multiple video layers, a heap of effects,
a heap of audio, really putting these systems under load,
and they played back really, really well.
And smoothness, scrubbing through the footage was good.
Editing performance is where you would expect it to be
on a system like this in Adobe Premiere or Da Vinci Resolve.
And even on the craziest of timelines in Adobe Premiere,
the lowest we had to drop the quality to
to be able to get smooth editing and smooth playback
was to drop it down to half.
So we didn't have to drop anything below that,
which is insane.
Okay, so where we're at right now,
before we jump into the benchmarks is
that on Mac, Da Vinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere
are running really bad.
And Final Cut is running really, really well.
On the PC side, Da Vinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere
are running really, really well.
Okay, so now let's look at the benchmarks
and render times of these two systems
on these different applications,
because this is where things get really interesting.
Now, we didn't just want to create something really basic,
something simple for these systems to export.
I wanted to put them under some load
so that you can really see
where the power is and the sorts of results you can get
after putting your system under some load
with a pretty complicated timeline.
So, what we did is we created a 20-second
4K editing project on each of these applications,
and we stacked up four layers of 4K video footage
on top of one another.
We scaled them all down to 50% to shrink them
so that they all fitted inside of the one 4K project.
So one 4K project, four layers of 4K video.
The 4K video files that we're using
are 100-megabit 4K footage off the Panasonic GH4.
Then to put the system under some more load,
two of those clips we said to reverse,
and we applied basic color correction
to all of the four video layers.
And to put the system under even more load,
we applied a LUT to the timeline as well.
So in Premiere, that was done through an adjustment layer,
and in Final Cut, that was done through a compound clip.
Okay, so that project file we created in Adobe Premiere
so we could use it on both system.
We also created it in Da Vinci Resolve for both systems,
and we recreated that same project file
in Final Cut on the Mac as well.
So just hitting play on that project file
on the beast of a Windows system,
we had to set it to half to be able to play that back.
The same project in Da Vinci Resolve,
we were only able to get 10 frames per second playback
when it's a 25 frames-per-second project.
So Da Vinci Resolve, even on this beast of a system
was really starting to struggle.
On the old MacBook Pro side,
Da Vinci Resolve was maxing out at three frames per second.
So really, really under some load
and definitely unusable at that point.
In Final Cut Pro, however, this thing just churned through.
It didn't have to make any adjustments.
Scrubbing through the timeline was really snappy,
and I do wanna point out here
that background rendering was turned off
and caching in Da Vinci Resolve was off as well.
So I was very surprised at this point
with the power that Final Cut had
without any optimization, any background rendering,
how it was able to seamlessly play that back,
whereas it struggles so much on Resolve on the same system.
So the next thing we did was export those files,
and we timed the renders to see which ones were fastest.
And I'm sure this is the part
that you're all hanging out for.
For exporting, across the board,
we based everything off the export settings
in Adobe Premiere Pro for YouTube 4K.
So the files were H264, 40 megabits per second.
About Premiere Pro on the beast of a windows system
exported this project file in three minutes, 14 seconds.
Da Vinci Resolve on the exact same system
did the export in 36 seconds.
So that is a huge difference between the two.
On the MacBook Pro side, Adobe Premiere took
a whopping five minutes, 43 seconds to export this project.
Da Vinci Resolve was pretty similar at five minutes 40,
and Final Cut Pro, with background rendering turned off,
exported in 42 seconds
on this old 2014 MacBook Pro.
So these numbers are pretty interesting,
and to see the difference with export times
on Adobe Premiere Pro on Mac,
yes, it's an older Mac,
but on Mac versus a really powerful desktop PC.
But not just Adobe Premiere Pro.
Da Vinci Resolve as well.
It really took use of the much more powerful hardware
in the Windows PC system.
Now probably the most interesting part about this whole test
as far as I'm concerned is the render time on the Mac,
the old Mac on Final Cut Pro.
It is insane.
And this is one of the key reasons that Final Cut Pro
is a major part in our video editing workflow.
We definitely don't use it for every project.
As I said, for all of our stuff where we're working
with external editors, we use Adobe Premiere for that.
So now our new beast of a Windows system
is going to be amazing at cutting through that footage.
Trying to render that out on the MacBook Pro,
yeah, you can see what I've been dealing with.
As I said earlier, even to make some changes
to some of our weekly videos,
it could have been up to two hours to export that out,
whereas now on this beast of a PC video editing system,
it's less than seven minutes.
So from around two hours
to around seven minutes is just crazy,
and you can see the render times across the board here.
And just to give you an idea as well, we normally edit
in Final Cut with background rendering enabled.
It's actually the default if you're using Final Cut
to have background rendering enabled or switched on.
So when we did the same export on that same 4K
with four video layer project
with background rendering enabled,
the time actually dropped to just under seven seconds.
So most of our exports when we're editing in Final Cut
is a maximum two to three minutes there for an export.
If we're going to wait two to three minutes,
it must be a crazy timeline.
But in a lot of cases for us,
our exporting out of Final Cut into an H264 file
is normally instant or under 10, 15 seconds.
So it's crazy.
So after seeing these results,
we decided to run a few more tests to see
if we could get any different results between the two.
And it was pretty much exactly the same,
no matter what we did.
Premiere and Da Vinci Resolve on this MacBook Pro
was terrible in comparison to how it ran on the PC.
Yes, that's obvious.
It's a way more powerful PC.
But, Final Cut on this older MacBook Pro
was much, much faster in every export over Da Vinci Resolve
and Adobe Premiere on the PC, which is crazy.
So the Mac clearly outclassed,
but this was not a strictly fair fight.
So with that in mind,
if you're looking for a portable editing solution,
MacBook Pro with Final Cut is clearly an awesome choice.
But the benefits are highly contingent
on you using Final Cut Pro.
As soon as you don't, then those benefits disappear.
And that's also part of the reason that I'm still using
this 2014 MacBook Pro instead of the latest MacBook Pro.
For me and the videos that we're creating,
there wasn't a huge difference on these render times
on the overall editing experience
between the newer MacBook Pros and this one
when we're editing these types of YouTube videos.
But in saying that, I'll definitely be upgrading
when the new ones are announced.
So then if you don't need portability
or you don't like Final Cut, then a desktop PC is awesome,
no matter what software you're using.
It'll just chew through your renders.
And of course if you're looking
at the power difference here, you could go
with a Windows laptop, something like the Dell XPS 15-inch,
which has amazing specs, not close to the desktop,
but still more powerful than the Mac
for Premiere and for Da Vinci.
So even with this crazy beast of an editing system,
I'll still be using my old MacBook Pro
for Final Cut projects.
It's just so fast, and it's portable.
Now if I had to choose only one system right now,
it's probably going to be like giving up a child,
but I'd probably say goodbye
to my editing desktop, just for those reasons.
And even with a desktop,
I'll still upgrade to a later model MacBook Pro
when the new specifications are announced.
I think the two of them will work well together.
I think our next move is to try and set this thing up
as a Hackintosh to see how that goes.
As for our new desktop setup, if you're interested
in exactly what we're running in this PC,
I'll link up a separate video with a review of this system
onscreen as soon as we've finished it.
But for now, I've included a breakdown
of all the components in the description below.
But that video will take a look at everything in more depth.
I'll see you soon.