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Podcast production: Mac Pro vs. MacBook Air

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Soumis par Mika.Seppala le mer, 2008/10/22 - 23:52.

I am spending a lot of time with podcast production. During the process of learning this trade I have gone through lots of hardware and software. From Windows to Mac, from USB microphones to condenser microphones etc.

Today I got my new Mac Pro set up and files transferred. The new computer is Mac Pro 8-core (2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM). I tested this against my MacBook Air (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM).

In the test I first imported five Quick time movies to iMovie in both systems. These Quicktime movies where produced previously as exports of Keynote presentations with audio. Within iMovie I then combined these movies to a single 8:35 long medium size movie (640x480).

When creating podcasts for my students I typically produce movies in three different sizes (mobile, medium and large). The production, that is the creation of the final product from within iMovie when the movie already has been composed, of these three different sizes of podcasts takes typically more than 90 minutes for a 10 minute podcast. This is a slow process to which I wanted to get an improvement by upgrading hardware.

Here are the "not scientifically" produced numbers (I was simply taking time with a stop watch):

1. Importing video clips to iMovie: 2:56/1:25 (MacBook Air times given first), q = 2.07.
2. Within iMovie, exporting a 8:35 minutes long movie in medium format (640x480): 25:40/4:37, q = 5.62.

This is a dramatic improvement. Exporting movies with Mac Pro takes less than a fifth of the time compared to MacBook Air.

I have ordered 16 GB memory upgrade for the Mac Pro from Other World Computing. I should receive that tomorrow. I will then retake this speed test and report back to this blog of the results. Anyway, it seems clear that getting a more serious computer for podcast production was the right thing to do.

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Testing with large movies

Soumis par Seppälä, Mika le jeu, 2008/10/23 - 23:34.

I did run the test again producing 720 x 450 size movies with MacBook Air, Mac Pro w 2 GB and Mac Pro w 16 GB of memory. The results regarding importing the five video clips, of which the movie was produced, were 1:25/1:32/2:45 (Mac Pro 16 GB/Mac Pro 2 GB/MacBook Air). The results regarding exporting the 720x450 movies were (in the same order) 5:44/6:22/15:58.

This time MacBook Air performed better than in the previous test. In the first test the MacBook Air used an external disk (on which the files were stored), in this test the files were all in the internal SSD disk, which is pretty fast but not very large.

In all cases the same movie was being produced. Its length was 8:35.

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