Buying Mac for Qlab

Hello,

My theatre has a 2017-era Mac Mini that has run great for 99% of the stuff we throw at it. It has noticeably slowed down recently when we a couple videos at a time with projection mapping on Qlab. Also, we had a recent conference in our space where the presenters used Prezi, PowerPoint, and had video content we were planning to play through Qlab. Having all of this open made our Mac Mini chug and we had to resort to either strategically opening and closing applications, or running some of the content from a separate laptop.

So, I am now searching for a better solution so we don't have this issue in the future. We need the use of Qlab, so I have to go with Macs, but am I better off going to a Mac Pro (trashcan not the newest one) or are the New Mac Mini's powerful enough for the kind of content I explained above?

Thanks!

Quite a bit of discussion on this topic already:

https://www.controlbooth.com/posts/336784

https://www.controlbooth.com/posts/330546

The quick answer is, buy as much computer as you can afford so you don't have to do it again in a year when you run into the next performance bottleneck. Some aspects are less problematic to compromise on than others, and it depends on what exactly you do with it - using lots of QLab's built in effects, or doing it all in Adobe etc... And I think laptops rather than the desktop Pro or Mini have distinct advantages while offering enough performance (in Pro) for all but the most extreme scenarios.

Also, one day someone might try to toss their half-eaten Caesar salad wrap into your Mac Pro, and the anchovies can really bog down the GPU.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a 2017 MacMini. Only a 2014 and a 2018.
If you have a 2014, that's a great machine that is still highly sought after because it was one of the few MacMinis that came in quad core.
Most Mac Minis are very easy to work on and because of their size and expandability, a great purpose built machine.

I'd do things to make your machine run faster.
1. Replace 5400 Hard Drive with a 2.5" SSD. You'll go from 60MBps read/write to over 400MBps depending on the drive you choose. ~$100
2. Upgrade to 16GB ram. ~$100

There's an iOS and Mac app called Mactracker that lets you easily look up the specs of your device based on model number.

Also, if you'd rather not upgrade, I'd be happy to take it off your hands and add to my existing stack!

as part of prep for using Qlab, especially with out a beeding edge mac. Make sure your Video play back resolution matches your source file. That will seriously decrease CPU/GPU load and processing cycles. Use Ideal file (uncompressed) formats and h.264 encoding for better efficiency in the Qlab backend.

Also note that different applications use different processing. When you are rendering video in an editor, it is more likely to rely on the CPU, while media servers often rely on the GPU. Without a discreet graphics card, playback is more limited. Relegate all of your video files to a single codec (whichever is preferred by that program).

If you have Adobe Creative Cloud, I HIGHLY recommend Adobe Media Encoder. Really easy to setup transcoding and scaling jobs and will use your graphics card (if you have one that has CUDA cores) for scaling jobs and for changing FPS. It doesn't accelerate algorithm changes (MPEG-2 to H.264 for instance, that's a CPU intensive process, not a GPU intensive process)

Colin said:

Also, one day someone might try to toss their half-eaten Caesar salad wrap into your Mac Pro, and the anchovies can really bog down the GPU.

Click to expand...

For some reason this sounds like the voice of experience.