After 6 years, Apple introduced an upgrade that had video editors, photographers, and those with the need for ultra high speed jumping with glee.
While it can be easy to get excited about new features and tools, reviews are often mixed – especially with Apple products. But with the latest feedback from editors streaming in, there may truly be something exciting about the 2019 Mac Pro.
First of all, it looks spectacular and clean, as is common with all Mac products. But it gets even better when you take a peek inside.
Simultaneous 8K ProRes RAW Video Playback
If you’re an editor that is prone to multitasking, you’re going to love this brand new feature. On older Macs, replaying 4K, ultra high definition or 8K videos, you may have encountered slow downs and wait time for playback. Not anymore!
The new Mac Pro features Apple Afterburner, an accelerator card that allows for not just one but three simultaneous streams of 8K ProRes RAW video playback. As stated by Apple itself, the Mac Pro supports:
- Up to 3 streams of 8K ProRes RAW video at 30 fps8
- Up to 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW video at 30 fps
- Up to 16 streams of 4K ProRes 422 video at 30 fps
Any professional post production company will find both the increase in speed and quality a game changer for many internal projects.
Apple Pro Display XDR
Video editing and production is all about the picture quality. In order to match the horsepower and speed of the new Mac Pro, Apple also introduced a brand new display to go along with it: the Apple Pro Display XDR. The Apple Pro Display XDR features a 32-inch Retina 6K display with P3 wide and 10-bit color, 1,600 nits of peak brightness, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
Video Editing on the New Mac Pro
Although its basic setup is already pretty impressive, the Mac Pro comes with an inbuilt architecture that allows you to add more speed and configure the machine to your liking as you go along.
From animating 3D film assets to compositing 8K scenes to building complex 3D environments, the Mac Pro supports up to 56 teraflops of graphics performance in a single system.
Other key features to note include:
- Blackmagic Design brings full CPU and multi-GPU accelerated 8K real-time editing, effects, and color correction in ProRes 4444 for the first time on any system.
- Avid can enable support for up to six HDX cards, resulting in more IO, increased voice count, and two times the real-time DSP processing than any other system can achieve in Pro Tools.
- Maxon’s Cinema 4D is seeing 20 percent faster GPU render performance when compared to a Windows workstation maxed out with three NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards.
Whether you’re using it for video editing, rendering complex graphics, or editing audio the new Mac Pro is a professional grade post-production suite with everything you need to create your next great video.