I don't work in Hollywood, but I work heavily in production engineering for television productions that work on A LOT of 8K RAW video and multicam where time is critical, we have days to edit where hollywood has months and multicam is pretty damn taxing vs how a lot of movies operate.
Our budgets are a fraction of a hollywood production though.
The base model Mac Pro isn't going to be doing much at all. The higher end model with a lot of upgrades is going to be the sweet spot. You really need to push up to a 12-16 core, with 64-128gb RAM, 11+gb GPUs and then add the afterburner card (cause Apple won't play nice with Nvidia) if you want to be doing anything with 8K RAW on a high resolution display.
Yes, the Mac Pro is essentially an infinitely upgradable machine. That's awesome. But third party support is questionable and without Nvidia that leaves a lot of speculation as to what the afterburner card will truly be able to do.
I'd kill for that motherboard in a smaller CPU buildout. In a high budget post-facility environment, it may be an ideal candidate. Currently there isn't a Mac in our reach that doesn't overheat or choke on big media projects (we refuse to look at the iMac Pro seriously).
We've been holding off buying new gear for several years. Most of the editors I work with would prefer to stay on macOS, but the base model should have been $3500 8-Core with a lot more GPU horses. Apple delivered a $6000 box without anything to back it up. At a minimum we'd have to upgrade to a bigger GPU and add the afterburner cards and a little RAM, probably pushing us close to $10k mark.
AMD Ryzen 3000 and Threadripper builds are going to be increasingly more common for normal budget media work. The Intel i9 is our current sweet spot for budget to power ratio.
If I was in an unlimited budget post-facility, yeah, I'd get one cause it looks pretty damn cool and I love macOS. But I don't expect it to solve a lot of real world problems if upgrades are bottlenecked to proprietary offerings from Apple. We're going to have to wait and see if they can keep up with the rest of the industry.
Do you have your production software for Windows/Linux or is it only for MacOS? If you do, then you can very likely get the same specs for much lower cost from Taiwan based ODM builders like AIC, Gigabyte etc. They have these server-class motherboards in datacenter class mechanical/thermal chassis. After that, you can ask them to slap on whatever Intel CPU with how much ever RAM and how much ever PCI-E cards (GPUs, NVMe SSDs, custom ASIC accelerators, 50Gbps NIC etc) you want.
The place I work decided that the iMac Pro was a no buy (much like a couple of models of Mac mini) because so little of it can be serviced locally and the RAM is not upgradable.
We have actually started buying Intel NUCs for our student labs instead of Macs. Adobe and Office work on both.
Serviceability of an iMac in a short deadline environment that is running close to 24/7 with sustained graphic and 8K renders / conversions. It's just not the right tool for the job. If I worked on single track edit with long deadline client work, like at an agency, I think it would be fine for most basic media stuff.
I'm fairly positive the iMac Pro would melt though. Even if it didn't melt at first, the load it lived under would greatly reduce the lifespan of the machine.
eGPU isn't an option. Nvidia if you're working with RAW becomes pretty critical and the support for that was greatly reduced with Mojave. RTX cards have been a gamechanger for most of the work we do.
Our budgets are a fraction of a hollywood production though.
The base model Mac Pro isn't going to be doing much at all. The higher end model with a lot of upgrades is going to be the sweet spot. You really need to push up to a 12-16 core, with 64-128gb RAM, 11+gb GPUs and then add the afterburner card (cause Apple won't play nice with Nvidia) if you want to be doing anything with 8K RAW on a high resolution display.
Yes, the Mac Pro is essentially an infinitely upgradable machine. That's awesome. But third party support is questionable and without Nvidia that leaves a lot of speculation as to what the afterburner card will truly be able to do.
I'd kill for that motherboard in a smaller CPU buildout. In a high budget post-facility environment, it may be an ideal candidate. Currently there isn't a Mac in our reach that doesn't overheat or choke on big media projects (we refuse to look at the iMac Pro seriously).
We've been holding off buying new gear for several years. Most of the editors I work with would prefer to stay on macOS, but the base model should have been $3500 8-Core with a lot more GPU horses. Apple delivered a $6000 box without anything to back it up. At a minimum we'd have to upgrade to a bigger GPU and add the afterburner cards and a little RAM, probably pushing us close to $10k mark.
AMD Ryzen 3000 and Threadripper builds are going to be increasingly more common for normal budget media work. The Intel i9 is our current sweet spot for budget to power ratio.
If I was in an unlimited budget post-facility, yeah, I'd get one cause it looks pretty damn cool and I love macOS. But I don't expect it to solve a lot of real world problems if upgrades are bottlenecked to proprietary offerings from Apple. We're going to have to wait and see if they can keep up with the rest of the industry.