If you paid attention to computers in this past year and you cut videos every day like i do
i bet you're tired of hearing how great the new apple silicon m1 chip is when you just knew
it didn't have enough ram or even enough ports to get any real work done
but now the m1 pro and the m1 max computers are out with literally everything we could have hoped
for in a laptop for video editing. We already know it has excellent geeky benchmarks but what
i want to know is if this m1 max macbook pro can replace the need for a dedicated mac pro
cheese grater which costs over twice the price therefore today we're cutting to the chase with
seven real world video editing tests in davinci resolve comparing the m1 max against the mac pro
this 14 inch m1 max macbook pro has a 10 core cpu a 24 core gpu a 2 terabyte blazing fast
internal ssd and the maxed out 64 gigabytes of unified memory davinci resolve can use that
memory reducing the need to swap memory across to the ssd the 2019 mac pro over here has a
3.3 gigahertz 12 core intel xeon processor with an amd radeon pro 580 x 8 gigabyte gpu
also with a two terabyte internal system drive and a whopping 96 gigabytes of ddr4 memory
that machine's a beast and it's got the price tag to show for it oh and just for context and
perspective here i've been editing professionally for nearly 20 years doing commercial work for one
of the top global ad agencies in the world and also in the nonprofit space for a large house
of worship here in colorado i also spent several years as a post-production director of technology
and the point is is that i've loved computers ever since i built my first pc as a teenager
with my dad and cutting video is not just my career it's still my passion
now on to the test. To even the playing field all the tests use the same samsung t7 nvme ssd
this drive is what i recommend most video editors use if you don't already have an external sandisk
drive and hit start and it looks like we're about 750 megabytes per second both on read
and for write next i want to find out how fast the drive inside the macbook pro is and
holy cow oh my gosh over 6 000 and five thousand megabytes per second
and now we want to see how fast the internal drives are on the mac pro
all right not so bad i can work with that so between two thousand and twenty eight hundred
megabytes per second when you're the dit on set or you sit back at your desk with an sd card you need
to get those video files off the card and the new mac pro has a uh s2 card slot for that so for the
laptop we're going to use the built-in slot and for the mac pro we're going to use my favorite
four slot sd card reader from startech this thing is so good i should probably do a video on it i've
got almost exactly 50 gigabytes of real footage here on the sony v90 uhs2 card which i'm going
to plug right into the macbook pro and we're going to see how long it takes to copy on both machines
straight over to the internal drive so moving it to here which is on the desktop and start
boom 2 minutes and 48 seconds so the copy to the mac pro is actually faster than over
to the macbook pro with the internal reader my hunch is that it's actually the startech
um uhs2 card reader here that is outperforming the internal one here on the macbook pro but
that was pretty interesting it's still pretty fast either way when you're talking about 50 gigabytes
now we get to see what the built-in media engine with multiple prores accelerators
and dedicated hardware for h.264 and h.265 is all about my biggest question for this test is
how does the timeline actually feel when i push play does it play does it respond when i trim
does it trim so i put together timeline with a variety of notoriously hard to play back
footage consisting of sony xavc hs h.265 10bit 422 gopro h265 and h264 dji drone
footage blackmagic raw and even the troublesome canon r5 10-bit h265 footage surprisingly for
the first time in my life i've seen this all play back perfectly it's like a miracle
in fact i tried playing back four h.265 clips together in a multi-cam and it wasn't a problem
smooth as silk the only time i dropped frames with the macbook pro was trying to play back a
9 camera angle multi-cam with 4k h265 footage that didn't work and everything just feels snappy and
responsive when i'm trimming and scrubbing okay now i'm looking at the mac pro to see
how that performs we're also at 3840 by 2160 on the timeline hit home let's just take l to play
and right off the bat as soon as i hit play my frame rate drops but once it gets going it does
okay see what i like to do is i like to push play and i like it to start playing right when i push
play not four seconds after and then look at this kind of playback 6.7 frames per second on a mac
pro four angles of multi-cam doesn't work there's no way it can't do it it's terrible look at that
it's just it feels sticky that's what it feels it feels really sticky it's not super super pleasant
i'm curious if the new davinci resolve speed editor is also responsive so let's take a look
at the same timeline using only the speed editor to navigate and trim in the cut page i kind of
expected this but the search dial on the speed editor in the cut page feels really smooth on the
m1 max macbook pro it's almost as if the footage was already prores jog and scroll work great
now the shuttle button is still pretty touchy but it could be manageable with some finesse although
i pretty much avoid using shuttle control it's really not the easiest control on the speed editor
next i just want to try how the speed editor works with the mac pro with this highly compressed and
high rest footage i don't feel like it's going to be a whole lot better than the keyboard was
oh boy this really jumps all over the place let me go to the cut page and see if that's any different
so the cut page scroll definitely seems smoother right there then the edit page if we go to the
edit page it jumps all over the place which is kind of interesting yeah it's very very stuttery
here in the edit page this is on the mac pro but if i jump over shift three to get over here
my thumbnails are not updating but at least
the search dial is moving really nice and smooth you can see right there
so again this is h.265 4k stuff so this this shouldn't play back this is like a technological
marvel that even kind of works but um you know we saw much better performance on the macbook pro
that motion on these clips it is it's terrible it's it's pretty bad i probably wouldn't use
i wouldn't use the speed editor in the edit page for this specific project unless i had transcoded
the footage oh hey real quick while we're on the topic of the speed editor i want to welcome
you if you're new here because i have a lot of helpful tutorials on resolve and the speed editor
i'm chadwick and this is creative video tips which is here to help you craft stories that make a
difference and stand out so if you're into that subscribe right now because it's free and maybe
also hit that bell it could be a good deed for the day making proxies has been part of my workflow
ever since hd became a thing and it's just one of those annoying things where you pay now or you pay
later with your time and in davinci resolve it ties up the application so you can't do anything
else so let's figure out how long it takes to make some prores proxy at 1080p on both machines
and we're transcoding 26 minutes of 4k footage for the first time i can start to hear fans
starting to turn on here on the the m1 max macbook pro and stop three minutes 17 seconds for the m1
max macbook pro and for the expensive mac pro i had to keep waiting and waiting and waiting
and done seven minutes and 56 seconds we'll give it it could be 57 we'll call it seven minutes and
56 seconds it took on the mac pro to make proxies where we were at three minutes and 17 seconds on
the macbook pro 317 versus 756. that is insane the difference just to make prores proxy at 1080p wow
the uh prores accelerators that are in that thing they exist apparently they're doing their job
render cache helps you smooth your playback when you have complicated composites or effects but
it often needs to recache with the simplest trim on the timeline so let's see how fast
rendering out a preview of a motion vfx title is now let's drag the all-important thumbs up okay
and the bell down because those are good things to do right now and this test is on 10 seconds
of 4k footage you can see our playback isn't so great right now because it needs to render
so we're going to select the clips with user cache on and use render cache color output
and through the magic of editing the m1 max wins again at 33 seconds so 43 seconds for
the mac pro and look it's still not even after render caching it it's still not playing great
look at that so it's 43 seconds to draw render cache on the mac pro and it didn't even work
all that good at least at 4k let's let's see what it looks like at 1080. and just
so you know the laptop played 4k render cache no problem okay it looks like it can playback 1080
with the the render cache fine it just it was struggling with 4k footage so
the export render test is the classic youtube computer benchmark and while this doesn't matter
too much for short videos if you create hour-long content for sunday mornings this could be a huge
benefit to making sure you can wrap things up to watch that football game in the afternoon
i love that glitchy effect so each of this is gonna be a quick export the first one is
prores and it's a one minute timeline and it's all the footage we've been working with and go
and this is where things really get crazy look at that 15 seconds on the m1 max versus 42 seconds
on the mac pro for the one minute export now we're gonna export the exact same timeline with h.265 on
both machines to see how that does and go i think it might be in love with this new laptop for real
holy smokes 17 seconds not bad at all so 39 seconds for h.265 not too bad
it's actually faster to export the h.265 than it was the prores which is kind of interesting
and go oh yeah this is fast 17 seconds m1 max versus 61 on the mac pro this is just
wow overall i'd say playback feel is what has sold me on the m1 max chip so much of video editing is
about feeling and rhythm and touch so you can craft that perfect moment and evoke emotions
if a system's not responsive and you can't work faster than you can think then it just bogs you
down it can be a drag it doesn't just waste time which is money but it also kills your creativity
that being said you can still edit anything on any old computer with proxy files but for the
first time in my editing career since trying to edit with highly compressed high resolution codecs
i feel like this machine over here with davinci resolve can handle anything i needed to without
even needing to create those proxy files that's dailies for those of you in la or rushes if you're
across the pond i know you and i see you in the comments i also won't feel tied down to a specific
edit bay with the new macbook i love to camp in my winnebago travel trailer in the summer so now
we can keep creating more creative video tips out on the road and in the mountains speaking
of those tips if you want to learn more about using davinci resolve i suggest you click this
playlist right here and because there's so much more to learn i will see you in that next video