Attn Video Editors: What are you able to do on your m2 Air?

[GooseInTheCaboose]

For those of you who do video editing tasks, which tasks have you been able to do on your m2 Air?

Have you been able to do those tasks while you have other projects/windows/tabs open in the background? Or do you need to close everything else first? Do you get GUI lag (resizing windows, switching tabs etc) during any of these scenarios?

What's the most intensive stuff you've done on your Air?

I'm considering getting one, a little nervous about when I trim/cut sections of 4k and 5k videos from my GoPro while having MS Office and a bunch of tabs open in the BG.

 

[Wokis]

Work starts next week so I'll have more stuff to go by then but I've done some so far.

I work most of my days as a colourist with my main piece of software being DaVinci Resolve. Fortunately one of those that are very well optimised for AS. The material I get is usually 1080p Sony FX9/FS7/F5 XAVC-I 100Mbit footage or sometimes Amira/Alexa 2K ProRes HQ/4444. Whenever a drone shot is being thrown in it's usually H265 4K.

I did do a "normal workday scenario" test for a couple hours (you know, still on vacation.. so it felt wrong ) with me sitting and doing grades like I usually do on my MBP 16" 2019. Performance was fine, in fact it was better.

Entire test-timeline got graded with some heavy glow, blur, denoise and the "filmconvert nitrate" plugin scattered throughout, and I opted to export it as individual clips with 50 handle frames each (a lot of cuts so the 43 min show basically became a 90 min video to export) in ProRes. It did the work in an 74 min and I did not with a casual observation of the timer notice any slowdown towards the end.

I did not properly test GUI lag during this export, so can't answer that yet. I'd imagine if you slam the GPU hard you should see some.

If your task is simply to cut sections out of a video and then export in a H264/H265 codec.. well your phone can likely do that Nothing to worry about.

 

[Pugly]

Not a video editor or on a M2, but I recently pushed my M1 Air doing machine learning HD upscaling of a DVD. The cpu was cranked full blast for 2 hours. This was the most intense thing I've done for this long on a the M1.

And amazingly the Mac was completely usable during all of it. I was still moving files around, going to websites... watching HD youtube. All with barely any slowdown at all. This was really heavy usage for a long time, usually when editing the CPU barely does anything... it quickly does the needed calculation and goes back to low usage.

I think part of what makes the M1 or M2 feel fast is the efficiency cores is kept reserved to keep macOS snappy. And it's smart enough to not completely overwhelm the cpu when doing intensive tasks.

 

[BanditoB]

I was experimenting with Final Cut Pro on my M2 MacBook Air today and did some light editing with a few transitions and title overlays. I had a bunch of other apps open simultaneously and didn't experience any issues at all. It performed very well, even when exporting the video in the background.

 

[mous94410]

I was experimenting with Final Cut Pro on my M2 MacBook Air today and did some light editing with a few transitions and title overlays. I had a bunch of other apps open simultaneously and didn't experience any issues at all. It performed very well, even when exporting the video in the background.

What model do you have ? I’m hesitating between the base model or the 16GB and 256 SSD. I want to do some light editing video with Final Cut (for the first time)

 

[BanditoB]

I was on the 8 GB RAM, 10-core GPU with 512 GB storage model. Everything ran very well.

I had originally wanted more RAM and storage, but that's all that was available in my local stores on release day. A couple of days past the 14-day return window they got in several 16 GB RAM, 10-core GPU, 1 TB storage models, so I called Apple and, since I had it ordered online, they said that they could extend the return period for me. So, I returned the original and picked up the new model. The extra headroom with the RAM is nice to have in case I ever really need it, but the storage will definitely get used for videos and their creation.