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DaVinci Resolve Video Editor Gains New Processing Engine That's Up to 3 Times Faster on M1 Macs

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Blackmagic Design has announced a new update to its professional video editing and color correction software, DaVinci Resolve, that includes a new processing engine offering significantly better performance on Apple silicon Macs.

DaVinci-Resolve-17-3-Color.jpg

Thanks to the completely reworked engine, DaVinci Resolve 17.3 can work up to 3 times faster on Apple Mac models with the M1 chip, according to the company. The speed increase should make playback, editing, and grading of 4K and 8K projects faster using the software.

The new processing engine also uses tile based rendering, which can give users on notebooks up to 30% longer battery when working in DaVinci Resolve.

In addition, version 17.3 supports a new option on Mac computers with M1 for H.265 hardware encoding. It's now possible to prioritize speed or quality when rendering, with render times potentially improved by up to 65%. DaVinci Resolve now also decodes AVC Intra files using the media engine built into the Apple M1 chip, making decoding and playback faster when working with these file formats.

Meanwhile, new FX controls have been added, including new grid shapes and greater precision when using mosaic blur, allowing users to finely adjust the amount and appearance of pixellation.

Keyer garbage mattes now have rotation controls, making it easier to remove unwanted items from view, and new saturation and gamma controls on the glow plugin allow greater control and subtlety over lighting effects. Also, aperture diffraction in DaVinci Resolve Studio has new anamorphic aperture controls, allowing a wider range of lenses to be emulated.

DaVinci-Resolve-17-3-Edit.jpg

Elsewhere, new drivers offer improved latency, and more Fairlight export options make it easier and faster to pass on audio for further processing or inclusion in a larger project.
"This is truly an amazing update that gives customers huge performance and power efficiency gains on Mac models with M1, and it totally transforms your computer, simply by downloading this free of charge DaVinci Resolve software update" said Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty in a press release. "This speed increase is stunning and it's hard to believe. I have not seen a speed improvement this large since the original 68000 to Power PC transition back in the 1990s and it is just amazing. Who would have thought just a year ago that multiple 4K streams could be played back and edited natively on a MacBook Air, but it's easy now on DaVinci Resolve with M1. The engineering team has worked so hard on this new image processing engine for DaVinci Resolve, and it is an incredibly exciting time to be developing software for the Mac!"
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The DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Resolve Studio 17.3 update is now available for download from the Blackmagic Design website for all current DaVinci Resolve users. DaVinci Resolve is a free download on the Mac App Store for individual users; Resolve Studio, the enhanced group collaboration editing suite, costs $295.

Article Link: DaVinci Resolve Video Editor Gains New Processing Engine That's Up to 3 Times Faster on M1 Macs
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/20/davinci-resolve-new-processing-engine-m1-macs/
There seems to be a number of reviews complaining of crashing; anyone have first hand experience on an M1 Mac?
 
Apple Knowledge Navigator said:
And this is on M1! Just imagine what's in store for future M-chips...
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A less bad hardware encoder that also delivers quality?

forums.macrumors.com

Mac Mini M1 H.265 encoding?

Seeing exact same thing. I haven't compared the VT vs x265 quality yet extensively but eye test, the VT version had to be encoded at 8K+ BR to yield comparable quality to x265 which was closer to 2K BR. And of course the resulting 9GB file vs 2.3GB file.
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

I don't use the crappy hardware encoder from my m1. Only clearly superior software encoding with x264 and x265.
 
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Is the steep learning curve for Resolve worth it over FCP/iMovie?

Last time I tried the free version on my 2015 15" MBP it was slow and the fans went crazy, whilst iMovie was responsive and only hits the fans on an export.
 
leman said:
And that, my friends, is exactly the reason why Apple went with their proprietary GPU hardware and APIs instead of backing third-party hardware and Vulkan.
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I think this performance increase is more due to the unified memory architecture in the M1 than the GPU. The CPU and GPU can work on the same dataset at the same time. The data doesn’t have to be shuffled back and forth between the two processors.
 
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project_2501 said:
Is the steep learning curve for Resolve worth it over FCP/iMovie?

Last time I tried the free version on my 2015 15" MBP it was slow and the fans went crazy, whilst iMovie was responsive and only hits the fans on an export.
Click to expand...

For me personally Resolve was the easiest software to learn out of Resolve/FCP/Premiere. It's very logical and very well structured and easy to understand. I would say it's a lot more similar to Final Cut than to Premiere.
 
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leman said:
And that, my friends, is exactly the reason why Apple went with their proprietary GPU hardware and APIs instead of backing third-party hardware and Vulkan.
Click to expand...
Apple M1 is significantly slower under DaVinci Resolve 17.2 than current Windows laptops with AMD Ryzen and Nvidia GPU, as I have read. This is not surprising. An Asus g15, for example, has an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS (8 Cores, 16 Threads) and an Nvidia 3060 (8GB).
 
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Announce ProRes RAW support and one can finally make the leap. Love everything about Resolve except it can’t read my footage.
 
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k27 said:
Apple M1 is significantly slower under DaVinci Resolve 17.2 than current Windows laptops with AMD Ryzen and Nvidia GPU, as I have read. This is not surprising. An Asus g15, for example, has an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS (8 Cores, 16 Threads) and an Nvidia 3060 (8GB).
Click to expand...
Double the threads and a 3080 to beat an entry level chip is pretty telling. There’s also worse screen yadfa yadda. The M1 punches way above its weight is the point.
 
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k27 said:
Apple M1 is significantly slower under DaVinci Resolve 17.2 than current Windows laptops with AMD Ryzen and Nvidia GPU, as I have read. This is not surprising. An Asus g15, for example, has an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS (8 Cores, 16 Threads) and an Nvidia 3060 (8GB).
Click to expand...

If an G15 were slower than a passively cooled laptop that costs half as much and uses 8 time less power, it would have been very embarrassing indeed. Although, I am curious about the new 17.3 benchmarks. They say "up to 3 times faster", which is probably 30-50% faster than 17.2 on average.
 
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The M1 is good. No question about it. But Apple also sells the M1 in the MacBook Pro. And it has to compete accordingly.
The single core performance of the Ryzen (7nm) is comparable to that of the M1 (5nm).
 
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