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Interesting that they don't use the Mac Pro or Mac Studio. I guess it means the lower end Macs can do it all. It also means the Mac Pro is kind of pointless and way too expensive?

Not surprising that they aren't using Final Cut Pro though. FCP7 was better than Premiere at the time, and they messed it up. Now Resolve is the go-to for editing unless you're a professional editor, in which case you use Avid. If you didn't switch to Resolve then you're still on Premiere. But no one is on FCP7. And no one switched to FCPX.
 
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No need for Mac Pro or Studio cause they are cutting proxy files. Once it all goes VFX roundtrip and to conform and finishing then you need additional power.

I don't touch editing with a pole but I sincerely always admire and ask myself how these people can do cuts in premiere pro or resolve when daily batches hit hundreds of clips. Up until recently if you wanted to reframe the clip in PP you had to nest it which then you had to nest again in the timeline...
 
Just shows you how much power is in a Mac Mini, and 90+% of the time it will cover it. Multiple cameras, tons of clips, audio and it is just moving right along. The fact they did not need something more powerful, say a Mac Studio or even a Mac Pro, tells you just how much you can do.
 
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Crazy that they are using a Mac Mini as the primary editing machine. Really shows how we are at a point where hardware gains have caught up to our current software tooling.

I always laugh when I see new software developers asking "will the base macbook pro M4 with 16GB of RAM be enough to build an iPhone app??" Kid, I built apps on a Core 2 Duo with 512MB of RAM back in the day, any modern day mac is an absolute luxury in comparison.

Of course back then people built apps optimized for the hardware, and not bloated web apps optimized for developer convenience. Now software performance can hide behind super fast chips, tons of RAM and fast disk reads.
 
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Apple today shared a new "Behind the Mac" video that's focused on hit Apple TV+ show Severance, demonstrating how Macs were used for editing the series.


The 11-minute video is accompanied by an in-depth article with additional details, but be warned, there are season two spoilers in both the video and the article.

According to Severance editor Geoffrey Richman, the final episode of the series was one of the most difficult to edit. One scene had 70 angles and takes to choose from, so he used a single multicam clip to play nine angles simultaneously to choose the most ideal shots. There was around 83TB of footage to comb through.

Richman primarily uses an iMac, and because he works remotely, he connects to a Mac mini that runs professional video editing software Avid. When he's on the go, he's still able to work on a MacBook Pro thanks to the syncing between Macs.

The video that Apple shared has a lot more insight into the editing process, along with some of the concepts and ideas that the team took into account when working on Severance season two.

The second season of the show wrapped up last week, and the entire season is now available for streaming on Apple TV+.

Article Link: Apple's 'Behind the Mac' Video Dives Into Severance Season 2 Editing Techniques
Funny detail: Media Composer still isn’t Apple silicon native and neither is any of the supporting applications and processes that run along with a running version of Media Composer. There are no plans to do this transition.
 
Funny detail: Media Composer still isn’t Apple silicon native and neither is any of the supporting applications and processes that run along with a running version of Media Composer. There are no plans to do this transition.
Actually Avid just recently, finally, does have an Apple Silicon native version. It's not 100% native, but the big stuff is. Haven't had the (dis)pleasure of trying it out myself yet. https://www.provideocoalition.com/avid-media-composer-is-now-apple-silicon-native/
 
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None I know uses Final Cut Pro.

Some use Davinci, some Premiere Pro (actually more and more people, lately), the super-hardcore editors Media Composer, but none Final Cut Pro.

Same here. I am in the engineering/educational content creation sphere and most people use Premiere Pro or Davinci, I have yet to work with anyone who uses Final Cut Pro.

I am also on the wagon of people wishing for Apple to focus on their core business: exceptional hardware and functional software.
 
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Premiere Pro is a powerhouse, but I hate the interface.
This. Premiere Pro has pretty much everything you could possibly want, but it's horrible to use and not very user friendly. Final Cut Pro is much more simple to get to grips with and I prefer the timeline. The perfect editing software for me would have the tools and features of Premiere Pro with the interface of FCP.
 
I've been an assistant editor on an episodic series for a major streaming service that was cut in Avid Media Composer, which used a similar remote desktop Mac workflow, so I can share some insight if anyone's interested.

All the media files (video, audio, vfx shots, etc.) live on a big file server, like an Avid Nexis server. (Our show used Tiger Spaces server software which simulates an Avid Nexis.)

Avid effectively requires all media that you edit with to be converted into an Avid-friendly format. (Unlike say Adobe Premiere which is almost always happy to work with video files in their original camera format. Avid technically supports this "linked media" in theory, but in practice it crashes constantly.)

So all the video files the editors work with in Avid is transcoded into an Avid-friendly format like DNxHR or maybe ProRes. The 3 assistant editors they mentioned are the people who bring in the media and transcode it into Avid format. (Or maybe Avid proxy media is made on set by a DIT like @vladi (digital imaging technician) overseen by the cinematographer.) They usually will make medium quality media files for this "offline" edit, something like DNxHR SQ or ProRes LT at 1080p. And they will apply a basic LUT to the Avid proxy media files to make the color look decent. Good enough for everyone to look at during the edit, but not good enough for broadcast.

Avid is a very CPU-intensive program, it does very little work on the GPU. As someone mentioned before, until last month Avid was still an Intel-only program. The Intel versions do run fine on Apple Silicon Macs via Rosetta, just not as optimized.

According to IMDB there were 3 editors on Season 2. Probably each editor had a dedicated workstation computer sitting in the edit facility on a fast 10Gbe+ network connected to the Avid Nexis media servers. Then the editor can access their dedicated workstation via remote desktop, the video actually shows them using Jump Desktop (see screenshot below) which is the same remote desktop app we used on our show too. It's very good most of the time.

For Severance Season 2 to premiere mid-January 2025, the editing process was probably done in Summer 2024. The finishing of color grading and sound mixing would be done no later than Fall 2024, their final deadlines to deliver the finished show to Apple TV+ were almost certainly before Thanksgiving. (Our show premiered in January and it was due to the streaming service in like Sept/Oct. They want plenty of time to make all the foreign-language dubs, subtitles, marketing trailers, all that jazz.)

So it's quite possible in Summer 2024 that the editors were working from Intel Mac workstations in the edit facility, as Intel CPUs are the platform that Avid was really optimized for at that time.

It's also very possible that they were editing on M1-M2 Ultra Mac Studios or M2 Ultra Mac Pros. But an Avid edit facility wouldn't have been highly motivated to buy Apple Silicon Macs in 2024 since the performance of Avid specifically on Apple Silicon wasn't much better than on the 2019 Intel Mac Pro, and sometimes worse. (The show I worked on in 2022-23 was using a mix of 2019 Intel Mac Pros, some then-new M1 Ultra Mac Studios, and even a couple of 2012 Mac Pros were in the mix too, as a last resort.)

The press release says "On a lower floor within his apartment, Richman edits on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini. This Mac mini runs Avid — the industry-standard video editing software — from a post-production facility in Manhattan’s West Village."

I'll believe them that the Mac Mini is the Avid workstation, so I'd say it's a bit of a toss-up whether that's an 2018-2023 Intel i7 Mac Mini with 64GB max RAM, or a 2023 M2 Pro Mac Mini with 32GB max RAM. (The high-end Intel Mac Mini was still on sale alongside the original M1 Mac Mini, until the M2 Pro Mac Mini arrived.) I'd actually lean toward the Intel Mac Mini being the most likely investment for the post facility to have made, as a less expensive workstation option to the Intel Mac Pro. If they bought M2 Pro Mac Minis in 2023, they would have also had the option to buy Mac Studios, which they definitely would have done if they were buying in 2023.

Intel i7 Mac Mini would be quite capable of editing 1080p DNxHR / ProRes footage (easiest to edit formats)... that 70 camera multicam marching band scene though... wow.

Also, the iMac Richman uses at home is likely to be the 27" 5K Intel iMac, like the 2019-2020 i9 model, that was a very popular iMac with editors as it gave even better performance than the 2017 iMac Pro for less money. That iMac Pro was also a popular editor machine. And it was probably a Covid investment in work-from-home equipment right at the start of the Apple Silicon transition, as we needed fast reliable machines to continue working dependably while this whole new architecture transition and global pandemic worked itself out. I can't see many pro editors spending any money on a smaller screen 24" Apple Silicon iMac with limited RAM and CPU options. (My 2020 workstation purchase was a closeout 2019 MacBook Pro 15" with Intel i9 and Vega 20 GPU that I still use sometimes along my M1 Ultra Studio, although I mainly work in Premiere if I can help it.)

So when Apple says in the video that "Severance is edited on Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro" what they seem to mean is that the iMac and the MacBook Pro are the client computers running Jump Desktop, and the Mac Mini was the Avid workstation, and probably 2 of those 3 were Intel Macs. He mentions his MacBook Pro has HDMI, so it must be Apple Silicon, I think the 2015 MacBook Pro is a little too old now to be plausible. The little M4 Mac Mini with Studio Displays they show in the video wasn't available until after the show was finished, so it was just a staged shot for the purposes of the video. Or maybe the editors / post facility have now since upgraded to M4 Pro Mac Minis and so that is truly their current workstation at the time this video was made.

The Assistant Editors, by the way, are the ones who usually make the exports when a new cut of the show is ready to be screened. It is highly likely the Assistant Editors use the most powerful computers of the team, as they are the ones who do the heavy lifting of transcoding media into Avid format and also exporting cuts out of Avid to H264/5 Quicktime screeners. The AEs are almost guaranteed to have been working on Intel Mac Pros, or else M1/M2 Ultra Mac Studios or Pros. As Avid uses CPU rendering far more than GPU, the fastest multi-core CPU performance is the most important thing.

Anyway, what happens after the "offline edit" work is done in Avid (late summer / early fall 2024) is they then make exports of their editing decisions, and it goes into an "online edit" process, where another team then replaces the Avid offline media with the original quality camera files and sound files. Then a colorist will work on making the final color graded version of the picture, and sound mixers will work on building out the sound scape of the show. Final VFX shots will also be added at this time, probably during editing they were working with temp VFX placeholders. Usually something like DaVinci Resolve will be the tool used for color, and Avid's Pro Tools will be the tool used for sound. It's that Resolve+Pro Tools "online" version of the show that finally will go to broadcast. It's very possible those parts happened on Mac too.

Edit: this turnover from the offline edit to the online edit is probably the strongest suit of Avid compared to other NLE (non-linear editing) software like Premiere or especially FCP. Avid is really good at making the various exports needed for the colorist and sound mixers to work with. As it was the industry standard editing tool for a long time, the whole post-production pipeline kind of got built up around getting things into and out of Avid, so it can still do that part of the job quite well, and other people further down the chain usually prefer getting turnovers from Avid vs any other NLE. Although Resolve could be a good NLE option here too, if you edit in Resolve and your colorist finishes in Resolve, there's even less of an export needed, I imagine.

Edit 2: also the ability for 6 editors and assistants, plus a few others I'm sure, to all be working in the same project at the same time with the same set of media, that has been another long time strength of Avid that other NLEs are working on catching up to. Multiple people can have the same project file open, and when they open a "bin" of sequences/clips, that user is the only one who can write to that bin, it gets locked read-only for all other users.

In television especially the deadlines are the tightest, so there's the greatest need for multiple people to be working at the same time, to edit a ~10 hour long season. That's why a strong multi-user system like Avid continues to remain popular in TV in particular. In feature films there may be a smaller team with less of a tight deadline, so there can be more freedom of choice of NLEs in feature films.

Unlike Avid, Premiere historically locked the entire project file to the first person to open it, making the whole project read-only for everyone else. Adobe released a new "Productions" project format a few years ago that tries to work more like Avid, so you can have a meta-project of project files that can work more like Avid's bin locking system. It's decent, but not as seamless as Avid. Resolve also has a fairly new project sharing system that allows locking of individual sequences, I believe. FCP I think has no such native project sharing ability for multiple users, without the addition of extra software like PostLab. (Kind of like GitHub for video editors.) I'm sure there are workflows people have developed for dealing with multi-user projects in FCP, but it's not as easy as the other NLEs. (I could be wrong about FCP and Resolve, I don't know those tools as well.)
 

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I was about to buy into the severance hype and subscribe but that behind the scenes made it seem weirder than I thought and put me off watching it
 
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I just found some dumb as a rock mothers who just discovered computers can edit films and TV shows, which computers have been doing for three decades. Computers have had more than enough power to edit 4K media for over a decade. Clown ass fake tech experts who write headlines like this…



1743034271186.jpeg
 
Interesting that they don't use the Mac Pro or Mac Studio. I guess it means the lower end Macs can do it all. It also means the Mac Pro is kind of pointless and way too expensive?

Not surprising that they aren't using Final Cut Pro though. FCP7 was better than Premiere at the time, and they messed it up. Now Resolve is the go-to for editing unless you're a professional editor, in which case you use Avid. If you didn't switch to Resolve then you're still on Premiere. But no one is on FCP7. And no one switched to FCPX.
These movies and shows beg to differ that “no one” switched
 
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So, how is Siri’s AI delay progressing? Apple should concentrate on its core business rather than venturing into self-congratulatory Hollywood culture.
So did you see a programmer editing the video, or the editing process is AI generated? That's two unrelated things.
 
I've been an assistant editor on an episodic series for a major streaming service that was cut in Avid Media Composer, which used a similar remote desktop Mac workflow, so I can share some insight if anyone's interested.

All the media files (video, audio, vfx shots, etc.) live on a big file server, like an Avid Nexis server. (Our show used Tiger Spaces server software which simulates an Avid Nexis.)

Avid effectively requires all media that you edit with to be converted into an Avid-friendly format. (Unlike say Adobe Premiere which is almost always happy to work with video files in their original camera format. Avid technically supports this "linked media" in theory, but in practice it crashes constantly.)

So all the video files the editors work with in Avid is transcoded into an Avid-friendly format like DNxHR or maybe ProRes. The 3 assistant editors they mentioned are the people who bring in the media and transcode it into Avid format. They usually will make medium quality media files for this "offline" edit, something like DNxHR SQ or ProRes LT at 1080p. And they will apply a basic LUT to the Avid proxy media files to make the color look decent. Good enough for everyone to look at during the edit, but not good enough for broadcast.

Avid is a very CPU-intensive program, it does very little work on the GPU. As someone mentioned before, until last month Avid was still an Intel-only program. The Intel versions do run fine on Apple Silicon Macs via Rosetta, just not as optimized.

According to IMDB there were 3 editors on Season 2. Probably each editor had a dedicated workstation computer sitting in the edit facility on a fast 10Gbe+ network connected to the Avid Nexis media servers. Then the editor can access their dedicated workstation via remote desktop, the video actually shows them using Jump Desktop (see screenshot below) which is the same remote desktop app we used on our show too. It's very good most of the time.

For Severance Season 2 to premiere mid-January 2025, the editing process was probably done in Summer 2024. The finishing of color grading and sound mixing would be done no later than Fall 2024, their final deadlines to deliver the finished show to Apple TV+ were almost certainly before Thanksgiving.

So it's quite possible in Summer 2024 that the editors were working from Intel Mac workstations in the edit facility, as Intel CPUs are the platform that Avid was really optimized for at that time.

It's also very possible that they were editing on M1-M2 Ultra Mac Studios or M2 Ultra Mac Pros. But an Avid edit facility wouldn't have been highly motivated to buy Apple Silicon Macs in 2024 since the performance of Avid specifically on Apple Silicon wasn't much better than on the 2019 Intel Mac Pro, and sometimes worse. (The show I worked on in 2022 was using a mix of 2019 Intel Mac Pros, some then-new M1 Ultra Mac Studios, and even a couple of 2012 Mac Pros were in the mix too, as a last resort.)

The press release says "On a lower floor within his apartment, Richman edits on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini. This Mac mini runs Avid — the industry-standard video editing software — from a post-production facility in Manhattan’s West Village."

I'll believe them that the Mac Mini is the Avid workstation, so I'd say it's a bit of a toss-up whether that's an 2018-2023 Intel i7 Mac Mini with 64GB max RAM, or a 2023 M2 Pro Mac Mini with 32GB max RAM. (The high-end Intel Mac Mini was still on sale alongside the original M1 Mac Mini, until the M2 Pro Mac Mini arrived.) I'd actually lean toward the Intel Mac Mini being the most likely investment for the post facility to have made, as a less expensive workstation option to the Intel Mac Pro. If they bought M2 Pro Mac Minis in 2023, they would have also had the option to buy Mac Studios, which they definitely would have done if they were buying in 2023.

Also, the iMac Richman uses at home is likely to be the 2020 27" Intel i9 iMac, that was a very popular model with editors as it gave even better performance than the 2017 iMac Pro for less money. And it was probably a Covid investment in work-from-home equipment right at the start of the Apple Silicon transition, as we needed fast reliable machines to continue working dependably while this whole new architecture transition and global pandemic worked itself out. I can't see many pro editors spending any money on a smaller screen 24" Apple Silicon iMac with limited RAM and CPU options. (My 2020 workstation purchase was a closeout 2019 MacBook Pro 15" with Intel i9 and Vega 20 GPU that I still use sometimes along my M1 Ultra Studio, although I mainly work in Premiere if I can help it.)

So when Apple says in the video that "Severance is edited on Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro" what they seem to mean is that the iMac and the MacBook Pro are the client computers running Jump Desktop, and the Mac Mini was the Avid workstation, and probably 2 of those 3 were Intel Macs. The little M4 Mac Mini they show in the video wasn't available until after the show was finished, so it was just a staged shot for the purposes of the video. Or maybe the editors / post facility have now since upgraded to M4 Pro Mac Minis and so that is truly their current workstation at the time this video was made.

The Assistant Editors, by the way, are the ones who usually make the exports when a new cut of the show is ready to be screened. It is highly likely the Assistant Editors use the most powerful computers of the team, as they are the ones who do the heavy lifting of transcoding media into Avid format and also exporting cuts out of Avid to H264/5 Quicktime screeners. The AEs are almost guaranteed to have been working on Intel Mac Pros, or else M1/M2 Ultra Mac Studios or Pros. As Avid uses CPU rendering far more than GPU, the fastest multi-core CPU performance is the most important thing.

Anyway, what happens after the "offline edit" work is done in Avid (late summer / early fall 2024) is they then make exports of their editing decisions, and it goes into an "online edit" process, where another team then replaces the Avid offline media with the original quality camera files and sound files. Then a colorist will work on making the final color graded version of the picture, and sound mixers will work on building out the sound scape of the show. Final VFX shots will also be added at this time, probably during editing they were working with temp VFX placeholders. Usually something like DaVinci Resolve will be the tool used for color, and Avid's Pro Tools will be the tool used for sound. It's that Resolve+Pro Tools "online" version of the show that finally will go to broadcast. It's very possible those parts happened on Mac too.

Edit: this turnover from the offline edit to the online edit is probably the strongest suit of Avid compared to other NLE (non-linear editing) software like Premiere or especially FCP. Avid is really good at making the various exports needed for the colorist and sound mixers to work with. As it was the industry standard editing tool for a long time, the whole post-production pipeline kind of got built up around getting things into and out of Avid, so it can still do that part of the job quite well, and other people further down the chain usually prefer getting turnovers from Avid vs any other NLE. Although Resolve could be a good NLE option here too, if you edit in Resolve and your colorist finishes in Resolve, there's even less of an export needed, I imagine.
Great post… I can remember the first AVID systems being introduced back in the 90s… they were an absolute game changer… however any editor that has spent any time on Avid will have been burnt badly at sometime or other… a software upgrade that went wrong or removed features, broke features made projects unusable… as a result most editors are not keen to run the latest version as they are not comfortable with the new versions or dont trust… I happen to know that all the editing for season 01 a certain tentpole Amazon fantasy series was done on trashcan mac pros running very old OS and 3 generation old AVID software…. this was a across a team of 10 editors… and this was in the last 4 years… just sourcing enough trashcan mac pros of the highest spec to have as spares in case of breakdowns was a mission in its self… I saw a shipping palette of mac pros sourced from somewhere pilled high which all had to be readied to go so they could expand the editorial team or swap out a machine if one fried its self….

So no AVID doesnt need the latest and greatest mac to run successfully it has been running on mac for 30+ years…
 
I mean it's Media Composer they mostlikely transcoded everything to DNxHD anyway. So yeah 80 TB raw 12k footage down to HD and then remote desktop to cut proxies isn't all that hard.
 
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Not yet watched the video. But not surprising to see Apple promoting Macs with its hit show. Good to see that even iMac and the mini are used for production.
 
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None of the pros using a Mac Studio or Mac Pro...

interesting. Shows that they really need something to meaningfully make a difference in performance on those machines vs the consumer focused ones.
Mac Studios are very prevalent in the industry. There's not much difference price-wise between a mini with a pro CPU and the entry level studio. Both offer good value. The new Mac Pro... not so much. Never seen one in the wild, it's just not cost effective. The mini is "good enough" for anything than the most demanding workflows, people buy a studio for connectivity, future proofing and effects/3d-work, which can be more demanding. Heck, even my new Air with 32GB ram works nearly flawlessly for professional editing. It's smoother than anything what we used a decade ago for professional editing and demands haven't really changed as fast, as they used to. 8k is not really a thing.

Yeah this was basically when Final Cut Pro became Final Cut Pro X (the version after Final Cut Pro 7).


It's interesting, because Logic Pro still seems to be quite widely in use, at least in songwriter/producer circles.
As someone who uses both... It's night and day. I do like using final cut and find it offers enough for my professional work as a lone editor. If Logic is like Microsoft Word, feature wise, FCP is more like Apple Pages. If all you want to do is writing (editing), its fast, simple and it's minimalist interface can help you focus on the essential work. But as soon as you want to collaborate with others, or have a workflow with lots of different software, use advanced features (e.g. mix audio, edit from AI-subscribed text, track facial features for color grading, ...) or just be compatible with the rest of the world, it becomes a pita. I think, a lot of youtubers do use it, and that's it's target audience - but it's losing to the likes of capcut, that offer similar speed but faster innovation and more modern features. New final cut features arrive sparingly and often years after the competition.
 
Editing and color grading don’t require crazy hardware specs. Special effects on the other hand….

Generally speaking the term would be 'Visual Effects'. a.k.a Computer Generated Imagery. 'Special Effects' nowadays tends to be used to describe anything shot in camera/on set.

But you are correct in that 'Visual Effects' require a lot more horse power than editing does.

It is somewhat of an on-going disappointment for me that Apple spends so much time and effort catering to the editing market, year after year, decade after decade. But then cares so little about 3D content creation/CGI, which in itself is such an incredibly beautiful and diverse form of art and self expression.
 
I mean it's Media Composer they mostlikely transcoded everything to DNxHD anyway. So yeah 80 TB raw 12k footage down to HD and then remote desktop to cut proxies isn't all that hard.

MC is just a converter and not even a fast one. On set people prefer on-set/dailies software for all the dailies work like metadata, timecode, audio sync, luts, primaries and transcoding to proxies. More and more they want live color grading as well. Apps that excel are Colorfront, Assimilate, Daylight and recently Silverstack. I've seen people do that in Resolve as well but ...
 
New final cut features arrive sparingly and often years after the competition.

This is what's so frustrating, or it's a 3rd party paid plugin/subscription and then Apple feels less inclined to add the feature because they don't want to cannibalize people writing plugins for their software.

MC is just a converter and not even a fast one.

Avid Media Composer is a NLE. Adobe Media Encoder is a transcoding software
 
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