The pro verdict

To find out what the Pro’s intended audience thinks of it for real pro work, we handed it over to Alun Pughe, Commercial Film & Video Director for T3’ s parent company, Future

I’ve used a lot of different machines for high-end video editing, and I’ve never really cared which brand logo they have stencilled onto their chassis as long as they do the job. And I ask a lot from them. Now that 4K video is the norm in my sector of the industry, this has really put the cat among the pigeons when it comes to performance – doing anything in real-time with a timeline full of Ultra HD clips tends to bring a lot machines to their knees. When the iMac Pro came in I was thrilled to get the chance to see how it coped…

Let’s get this out of the way quickly: the iMac Pro is gorgeous. I’ve always been a fan of the iMac’s aesthetics but this is something special. The ‘Space Gray’ finish is flawless and the 5K, 27-inch Retina screen is breathtaking. The review model came with the lovely Magic Trackpad 2, which I found charming and very practical, and the Magic Mouse 2 which, possibly due to my large hands, I didn’t like so much. Both were fine and precise enough for video editing, though.

RED eye

For my work during the time I had the iMac Pro, I was using Adobe CC Premiere Pro, and collated RED Raw footage, Canon C200 CinemaRawLite and some lower tier Sony FS7 XAVC clips to see how the iMac performed.

Watching 4K footage back on the iMac’s screen was a joy. The colour space and contrast showcases your footage beautifully, but I soon found myself wishing I had more than 27 inches of screen to monitor the clips and still have space for scrubbing through the timeline or utilising other windows. The iMac does have multiple Thunderbolt 3 ports, so additional monitors would be sensible if you were purchasing for professional video editing. Thunderbolt 3 has enough bandwidth for 5K external monitors, and the iMac Pro can support two 5K displays on top of its own (or four 4K external 4K displays), so you get as much as space as you need.

Ingesting footage was instantaneous and as I placed the various 4K clips into the timeline, I was immediately impressed that there were no dropped frames whatsoever in playback. Adding multiple LUTs onto the clips for live colour grading during playback and making amends to their settings didn’t affect the experience either (even when playing in full screen). At one point, I had more than four layers of effects on a clip before playback started missing frames, and even warp stabilisation (a resource-intensive tool for reducing motion in videos) took moments and not the usual minutes to prepare.

The iMac did begin to struggle with 8K RED footage, and when effects were added a preview render was needed – but this was to be expected. 8K is really hardcore.

Exporting was also really impressive. I queued up a webfriendly one-minute H.264 video made up of random 4K clips to export at a 4096x2160, two-pass target of 25Mbps, and it was rendered within three minutes. That’s as much as five times faster than my usual (pretty damn beastly) machine. The process was surprisingly quiet and, though cooling fans weren’t heard, the iMac didn’t become noticeably warmer. Absolutely amazing.

So is the iMac Pro a must-buy for high-end professional video editors? It’s certainly an amazing machine that does everything you’d hope it would and it does them very well. However the cost is undeniably high and its limited upgradeability is a shame for future-proofing. It really was a delight to work on, though.