hey what's going on everybody welcome back to another video and today is a video that i really
didn't expect to make we all pretty much knew that apple was coming out with their own chipset
and we learned that they're going to start with the mac mini and the macbook air and
base macbook pro and we'll start to see their pro lineup hopefully begin next
year and to be honest this is the first event that i actually missed watching because i had
a video gig at the time and so i was catching up afterwards on social media and i was like
oh cool everyone really seems to like what apple announced and you know i looked into it and sweet
new mac minis new mac airs whatever and then people start getting them in their hands and
talking about how amazing they are and i'm seeing fellow content creators like man this thing is
pure magic and it can do unbelievable things and so honestly i just had to see what all the hype
was about and so today we're going to test the base m1 mac mini versus my nearly 9 000 mac pro
now just to get everyone up to spec speed here this is the base eight core mac pro 160 gigs
of ram it's got the 580x standard graphics card as well as i added a w5700x for a total
of 24 gigs towards the video ram and both of these machines have the base 256 gigs of storage
however i did add a two terabyte nvme ssd into my pro so all the tests will be done on the pro
with the footage being stored on the nvme ssd and on the mac mini it will be stored on the desktop
except for the last couple tests which we'll talk about which are just way too big to store on
256 so and by the way i don't do benchmarks you're not going to see any sort of geekbench whatever
who cares i mean your computer scores a million points great what does that actually mean the
only like benchmark test that i actually ran which i think is actually useful is a blackmagic disk
speed test because especially for video production this directly correlates to how well your timeline
playback is going to act and i was actually really surprised the right speed on the mac mini is
actually nearly double of what is on the base mac pro now i believe the base mac pro's 256 is slower
than the 512 or up but again i'm using an nvme ssd which gets about 3 000 megabytes per second both
read and write speeds so again that will help play back which we'll talk about later on all right so
let's get into some testing here and i want to talk about this like what i'm going to call the
single clip fallacy that we see in so many youtube videos where someone takes some crazy footage or
file drops it into a timeline and goes look this computer can handle this footage for example
i downloaded ursa mini pro 12k b raw files and i threw it on the mac mini guess what it plays back
okay not in full resolution you can get it to play back just fine with a couple little optimization
tricks but just keep in mind that while you're watching this video and every other computer
review video out there that there's a huge difference between a computer being able to handle
a couple clips or a small test project and then there's like feature films very very different
use cases now let's talk about where the mac mini is magical so the very first test i did was i took
one of my youtube videos and i exported all the individual files as prores 422 files because
final cut doesn't read b-raw files which is what i shoot in basically just did an export of about
a 20-ish minute uh video for what we were just talking about like the single clip fallacy this
falls in line with like the easier of the test benchmarks where it's just a bunch of clips thrown
on a timeline let's hit export and see how it does and to be honest i forgot to track how long each
one took because i'm used to resolve exports where it actually tells you how long it took
however keeping an eye on it the mac mini actually beat the mac pros render time by about 5 minutes
and throughout the entire export it consistently stayed 10 to 15 percent ahead of the mac pro now
touching upon the customizability of this computer if i was a final cut user and shooting and editing
in prores all the time i would buy the afterburner card which would probably then destroy what
the mac mini could have done and it would have exported probably twice as fast and so that is one
of the reasons why i love the pro but to be fair in this specific testing with what i have here
mac mini won that test and so yes i have an extreme bias in this video i just spent like
nine grand on this computer a couple months ago i want to see this thing struggle and die now
for the next tests i wanted to move out of final cut because to be honest we all know that pretty
much any mac out there is optimized incredibly well for final cut and so i'm like okay resolve
let's go so i opened up one of my full youtube projects here so this is just a 4k timeline
but it's got a full color grade on it actually added a decent amount of temporal noise reduction
and similar to the first final cut test what i did here is export them both at the same time and just
kind of let them do their thing now since resolve actually tracks the time it takes to export i
actually have some numbers for you the mac pro exported in 26 minutes while the mac mini did it
in 39. now i know what you're all thinking right now michael you really expect anyone to pay 8 000
more dollars to save like 12 minutes or 10 or 15 minutes of export time no i wouldn't because
while export time is incredibly important to someone like me who is literally editing
multiple times a day but what you're actually paying money for is the experience you don't want
any sort of playhead lag while you're moving the playhead on the timeline you expect it to keep up
if you're adding a clip or moving a clip disabling a clip adding a color correction all those little
moments that take half a second one second two seconds three seconds for the computer to load
whatever task you just did that adds up a ton what should have taken three or four hours to edit was
now taking six to eight so in the next test what i want to do is simulate some multitasking so what i
did is export the same exact timeline except this time while i was exporting i was like hey you know
what do we do while we export videos we usually work on a thumbnail so i opened up photoshop
and started working on that doing some random content aware fill not actually trying to make it
look pretty just trying to do some processor and gpu intensive tasks and i know you could say this
is somewhat unfair for the mac mini because adobe hasn't optimized their software to take advantage
of the m1 chips yet but to my surprise mac mini had no problem with this it opened up photoshop
super fast it was doing content aware basically on par with no delay just like the mac pro was
i then pulled up a 4k youtube video did picture in picture put that in the corner while i kept
editing the thumbnail as resolve was exporting in the background and the mac mini did an amazing job
at essentially transferring the power wherever i was working but this did come at a cost because as
i started watching the 4k video and messing around in photoshop i kept an eye on the progress bar
and resolve in the background and what was going to take about 40 to 45 minutes now was going an
hour hour 10 hour 20 because what it was doing is essentially giving less power to resolve because
it was like hey this is ryan in the background i gotta slow down because he's trying to do a lot
more stuff in the front end meanwhile the mac pro was chugging along nearly the exact same export
time around 26 minutes let me give you the exact numbers here yeah and so the mac pro actually only
took two milliseconds longer to render while doing the multitasking test so it finished in
26 minutes and 15 milliseconds as soon as i stopped doing the photoshop stuff and watching
the youtube video which i did for about 10 minutes of course resolved to pick back up and it quickly
was able to recover its time and took about 46 minutes to export this time so only added on about
seven minutes in total and obviously this is where having the 16 gigs of ram version will you'll fare
a lot better but still massively impressive on the 8 gig screen saver continuity all right but like
i said before i wanted to make this thing burn and so i wanted to see what step it would take
for it to really crush itself and surprisingly it only took one more step went to youtube searched
8k video and watched some switzerland's beautiful scenery shot in ak video while exporting the video
while photoshop was open and that basically made the mac mini unusable filled up all the ram all
the cpu and gpu usage and the screen was basically bogged down nothing froze nothing quit and nothing
crashed but you definitely weren't doing anything else and it took a handful of minutes for me to
actually close the video and get the video rolling again meanwhile roll an ak video on this on top of
all the previous mentioned tasks no problem all right now let's keep climbing the ladder here
and talk about where the mac mini struggles so i opened a project that i worked on last
year this was a music video that we shot with the red ak helium with anamorphic lenses that
doesn't really matter for the sake of the files but i just i love me some anamorphic now pay no
attention to the actual color grade i couldn't find the actual final color grade so for the sake
of this test i wanted color grades on there with noise reduction and everything but i didn't spend
hours through stuff on it and this is one of those project files of why people buy the 50 000 mac pro
Hey! because even this computer can't play back the full timeline resolution in 239 at 8k and so
i have it set up here for a 4k 239 aspect ratio and still i have to view this at half or quarter
resolution for the timeline playback but then it pretty much does fine i can keep the color grades
the noise reduction all turned on i can edit i don't like to make a lot of proxies or optimized
media just because i'm turning over projects so fast but if this was a lot more longer term thing
then i absolutely could do that now on the mac mini opening it up in the same format
breeded very different results i could not get this thing to scrub through the timeline smoothly
or anything until i turned off all color grades and effects so noise reduction included and played
it back at quarter resolution and so yes it is impressive if you needed to work on this project
and you only had the mac mini then yeah you could do it and again the 16 gigs of ram probably would
fare a little bit better probably not a ton better because it's more of a gpu limit but
yeah you would definitely have to create some sort of optimized media proxies or change the timeline
resolution maybe even to hd to get it to play back with the color grades turned on i don't want
to go too in-depth to this because it's pretty obvious but keep in mind these are very different
designed boxes this one is a thing that you cannot open up you cannot change as one hdmi port two
thunderbolt 3 ports and like a gigabit ethernet and headphone jack i believe whereas this one
you got custom ram slots you got custom pcie slots for more gpus for nvme ssds to mount i have like
six to eight thunderbolt three ports four hdmi ports headphone jacks usb type a usb type-c you
see when i worked in apple retail we were trained to ask a bunch of leading questions to help people
decide what computer was right for them there are two types of computer buyers there's the
i want to buy a computer that is going to suit my needs now and i usually upgrade every one
to two or three years and then there's the i'm spending a lot of money on this computer so i want
to buy this and have it for as long as humanly possible and with a lot of tech phones tablets and
whatever else i'm a one to three year type of person but with computers i want this thing
to last like a decade so the fact that this is fully swappable pretty much every component i am
very confident that i will have this for the next decade so if you're a content creator
whether you're starting out you're an existing one and you pick up something like the mac mini
and it's suiting all of your needs fantastic truly this is an amazing machine and it deserves all the
credit that it's getting on social right now and i can only imagine if this is the cheapest base mac
the pro lines coming next year those are going to be just like pure witchcraft because apple is the
king of optimization i did everything i could to throw at it to kill this machine and nothing
really killed it if you are a final cut user then you're probably going to be fine no matter
what mac you choose i'll leave you with this do i regret buying the mac pro a couple months ago
do i wish i waited until next year for whatever they're going to announce one that's a little hard
to tell because we don't know what they're going to announce but no i don't regret it whatsoever
because this is doing exactly what i need it to it's handling all the projects i can throw at
it it is a total beast of a computer and it's customized to my needs if i needed to do more
i can simply add to it without having need to sell and buy a whole new system every
couple years but yeah let me know what you guys think down in the comments below
i'm curious on your thoughts are on the mac mini how it stood up to the pro i'm sure this is going
to be a very fun comment section thanks so much for watching guys see you in the next video