Imagine a tiny little iPad 2 rendering video faster than far more expensive and powerful iMac’s, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros. Well, it happened. One man decided to see how the iMovie app for the iPad 2 performed against iMovie running on the rest of the Mac lineup. The results have surprised nearly everyone.
Tim Chaten at AppAdvice was the one who decided to run the test. So he took some video files to his local Apple Store and ran the test on three off-the-shelf Macs.
In the first test, he simply copied the files onto competing devices. It took about 25 seconds to copy the files onto the iPad 2. The closest competitor, an expensive Mac Pro, took about 56 seconds.
Next he tried rendering an unedited 720p movie. Once again, the iPad 2 won. It took 1 minute and 56 seconds to render the video. And once again, the closet competitor was the Mac Pro, clocking in at 2 minutes and 15 seconds.
Then he tried rendering an edited video…adding titles, music and photos. And this is where the iPad 2 stumbled…kind of. It took 2 minutes and 5 seconds to render the video, while the speediest Mac, a 17 inch MacBook Pro, completed the task in 1 minute and 48 seconds.
But is this a clear indication that the iPad 2 is the best choice for speedy video rendering? Not exactly. The files that were tested came from an iPod, meaning they were already in an optimal format for iOS devices. And the iPad 2 iMovie app is a stripped down version of the full Mac version.
But on the plus side for the iPad 2, it does contain a built-in H.264 encoder and uses speedy solid-state storage. Those are features that regular Macs can’t claim.
Yet ultimately, you’ve got to keep file sizes in mind. While Macs can accommodate terabytes worth of storage, the top iPad 2 can only do 64 GB. And since video files tend to be huge, that’s the biggest stumbling block on the iPad 2.