i purchased the 8 gig m1 mac mini and experienced these issues
and promptly returned it for the 16 gig m1 mac mini and as a video professional
these are my first impressions and some things that you need to know about
i'm rafael and welcome to the channel where our goal is to always fix it in camera and
then finesse it in post and i always appreciate the early thumbs up because the new direction
that apple is going with their arm processors is fantastic but if you're considering the m1 mac
and you do some serious creative work for clients there are some things that you need to consider
before choosing between the 8 gig or the 16 gig or if you should wait for the next gen m1x processors
i do video content every day i create videos for clients brands large businesses small businesses
editing motion graphics 3d animations you name it so my needs are pretty hefty and my plan was
to wait for the next gen processors to let apple work out the bugs for the software to be ported
natively to apple silicon as most pro apps are still intel optimized but my wife's 2015 mac
pro was due for an upgrade and we decided to pick up the mac mini as a replacement for her she has
her own channel and she edits videos in final cut pro and it made for a great opportunity for me to
just see it and test it myself we picked up the 8 gig base model set it up from scratch plugged in
an external ssd fired up final cut pro and instant issues footage flickering slow or non-responsive
playback crashes memory leaks system running out of memory and this was just having final
cut open at first we thought the flickering could be a cable issue so we switched from
the hdmi to a thunderbolt to a displayport and still the same issue then we thought it could be
the monitor so we tried three different brands we finally narrowed it down to the xf avc codec that
the c200 uses because that is our main video camera and that's the codec that we shoot in
and this flickering was happening with hd footage and no plugins or color correction applied the 4k
footage was even worse we got the spinning beach ball and the system locked up just to play it back
so until that codec gets resolved the workaround for now is to film it in 4k with the mp4 settings
and not xf abc or to transcode it to prores so the footage will play back better i'm not exactly sure
why the xfavc is causing this issue but i do feel that it will get resolved over time but right now
not really ideal i did also make sure that all the pro format codecs were updated and installed
but as of this recording this is still an issue also i did a test in davinci resolve and premiere
pro and there were no issues but my wife prefers to add in final cut pro and this issue only arose
when we're in better performance not in better quality but better quality presented another issue
where we couldn't get smooth playback when titles or other effects were applied to the footage our
eos r footage played back beautifully just like in all the examples we've seen online smooth no
issues just as advertised the xf avc codec caused a lot of the issues that we're having so if you
have a c200 and you're considering the m1 mac for pro work in their future just know that the other
codecs may have similar issues until they are all resolved for the crashes in the low system memory
this happened about every 30 minutes while we were editing the hd footage i wasn't really able to
figure this out and we returned the 8 gig before apple released the big sur and final cut update
but it mostly occurred when we were working with long clips that were over 60 gigs in size and that
size was almost the same that final cut was using in the system memory so i'm not sure if final cut
was trying to load the clip into memory and with only eight gigs of ram it forced it into swap
memory which caused a lot of the issues but since transitioning to the 16 gig model we have not
encountered that issue once though there's still a lot of random crashes in final cut pro and this is
why i don't recommend the 8 gig at all if you use final cut pro or photoshop your system needs at
least 12 gigs to run those two apps and all the other system functions otherwise it'll start to
move the memory into the ssd via the swap memory which means that the system is using the ssd like
ram and trying to move info from ram to ssd a lot and i know that the system can handle this
but it's meant to do this when needed not as a default and maxed out all the time there is a good
reason that these are entry level machines the 8 gig machine is really meant for the casual user
zoom calls web browsing word processing and light creative work with the occasional ability to push
the system it may work for a while but the swap memory will lead to issues at some point there is
no way to resolve that or expand with the unified memory the 16gb ram option is better suited for
those that need the headroom to multitask a little bit better but i personally would
wait for an option with at least 32 gigs if you need to do this type of work day in and day out
you'll be happier in the long run but if you use final cut and photoshop every day and you have to
have the m1 today spend the extra 200 bucks and get the 16 gigs of ram and ideally get the 512
ssd to go with it as well if the system has to use swap memory you'll have a lot more headroom
when you need it but as my first impressions the m1 mac mini is a pretty solid little machine
the pros are that with the right footage and native apps it does feel very snappy and creates
a very positive experience the rendering is definitely faster it feels like a 2021 computer
so high marks for what apple has done with this computer and i'm really really excited what they
have in store with the higher end machines the cons on the other hand are that it's still new and
early and prone to bugs memory leaks and random crashes so make sure that you have autosave set
up on your adobe apps and the 8 gig model is not really suited for constant pushing of the system
and that many codecs and apps still need time to work natively also make sure that you get a
hub because those ports fill up really fast what are your thoughts on the m1 mac is it a go or no
go for you let me know if there's anything you'd like me to test with the m1 mac mini as always
thanks for watching give this video a big thumbs up subscribe i'm raphael i'll talk to you soon