DaVinci Resolve vs Final Cut Pro on Mac Studio?

[Thunderbird]

PC user here. I am planning to start getting into video editing and am just exploring the possibility of using a Mac for this rather than a PC.

I am curious to hear from anyone who has experience in using both DaVinci Resolve (or Studio) and Final Cut Pro, about which video editing they prefer while working on a Mac Studio for 4K video.

Not interested in comparing the software editing features, just in how the hardware handles the software for each, in terms of speed and smoothness. I've read and heard that DaVinci Resolve works really well on Mac. But I wonder how it compares to FCP which is a native Apple app?

Which of the two actually works better and is handled better on a Mac?

Thanks.

 

[R S K]

No idea how you expect to compare NLEs, speed or otherwise, without talking about features. Never mind that it's entirely relative to what it is you need and, therefore, will be doing. Because both perform exponentially better than, e.g., Premiere Pro, but then one will do some things faster (and easier) than the other and vice versa.

It's also a question of stability, in which case FC is by far the most stable of them all. There is no one NLE that is everything to everyone.

 

[Thunderbird]

Thanks. Well at least you compared one aspect, which is stability.

It shouldn't be asking too much to compare the basic universal tasks of video editing: i.e. scrubbing through timelines, rendering, exporting, compressing, and things like loading times, and how snappy he software feels.

 

[R S K]

And since you can get a FREE version of both, I suppose you could also argue that it shouldn't be asking too much to just download both and find out for yourself in the context of the criteria that matter to you? 🤔

 

[Thunderbird]

You want me to spend $6,000 on a Mac when I could just ask the community for free?

 

[R S K]

$6000. Yeah. Quite the expert.

🤦🏼‍♂️​

 

[sevoneone]

The general editing experience in both programs is very, very good. Scrubbing, trimming, moving and adjusting 4k and 6k video is a smooth experience on any Apple Silicon Mac because of the media engine. Apple gave Blackmagic a lot of support in optimizing Resolve for AS and it really shows. Final Cut probably edges out Resolve on UI performance a little, but honestly you can expect a smooth experience in either program. People that have used Resolve on $5,000+ performance PCs with RTX 3080 and 4080 GPUs say editing 4k, up to 8k video, on a $1,500 Apple Silicon Mac is a smoother overall experience.

The differences come depending on what you're doing to your video. The playing field is pretty level when it comes to basic editing, color correction and adjustments. A $599 base M4 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM is going to be a more than capable 4k editing workstation for 80% of situations (assuming external storage). Get into something more complex that uses the Neural Engine in DaVinci Resolve like Magic Mask, Face Refinement or Super Scale, or adding graphics/animations, particle effects in Apple Motion, etc... and you'll want a chip with more GPU power and more RAM.

Video workflows are hard to generalize and you can't always trust benchmarks. There really isn't a one size fits all solution. For instance, people looking to use a lot of certain Neural Effects in Davinci Resolve that are optimized for Nvidia's RT cores might find their workflow is better on a PC with an RTX 30 or 40 GPU. For most, they're not using those features, or using them so infrequently, it makes little difference overall.

 

[Thunderbird]

The general editing experience in both programs is very, very good. Scrubbing, trimming, moving and adjusting 4k and 6k video is a smooth experience on any Apple Silicon Mac because of the media engine. Apple gave Blackmagic a lot of support in optimizing Resolve for AS and it really shows. Final Cut probably edges out Resolve on UI performance a little, but honestly you can expect a smooth experience in either program. People that have used Resolve on $5,000+ performance PCs with RTX 3080 and 4080 GPUs say editing 4k, up to 8k video, on a $1,500 Apple Silicon Mac is a smoother overall experience.

The differences come depending on what you're doing to your video. The playing field is pretty level when it comes to basic editing, color correction and adjustments. A $599 base M4 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM is going to be a more than capable 4k editing workstation for 80% of situations (assuming external storage). Get into something more complex that uses the Neural Engine in DaVinci Resolve like Magic Mask, Face Refinement or Super Scale, or adding graphics/animations, particle effects in Apple Motion, etc... and you'll want a chip with more GPU power and more RAM.

Video workflows are hard to generalize and you can't always trust benchmarks. There really isn't a one size fits all solution. For instance, people looking to use a lot of certain Neural Effects in Davinci Resolve that are optimized for Nvidia's RT cores might find their workflow is better on a PC with an RTX 30 or 40 GPU. For most, they're not using those features, or using them so infrequently, it makes little difference overall.

Thanks so much. Very helpful. Appreciate the in-depth, non-troll answer.

 

[sunny5]

PC user here. I am planning to start getting into video editing and am just exploring the possibility of using a Mac for this rather than a PC.

I am curious to hear from anyone who has experience in using both DaVinci Resolve (or Studio) and Final Cut Pro, about which video editing they prefer while working on a Mac Studio for 4K video.

Not interested in comparing the software editing features, just in how the hardware handles the software for each, in terms of speed and smoothness. I've read and heard that DaVinci Resolve works really well on Mac. But I wonder how it compares to FCP which is a native Apple app?

Which of the two actually works better and is handled better on a Mac?

Thanks.

All software have their own pros and cons and because of that, each software have their own uses. For example, DaVinci Resolve is well known for color grading, FCPX is well known for ProRes based simple and fast, and Premier Pro is well known for widely used with all types of codecs despite slow performance.

 

[TechWhisperer]

FCPX FTW!

 

[jedimasterkyle]

I recently switched to FCP from DaVinci Resolve and I have to say that I like FCP more. I've watched dozens of videos on Youtube about the pros/cons, similarities/differences, strengths/weaknesses of both and to me, they seem to be about even in terms of abilities. One might do one thing slightly better or more efficient than the other but they are both very capable NLE's.

I wasn't crazy about FCP's price tag and the free version of DaVinci Resolve is still a very capable NLE. For me, having ALL of the tools at my disposal in FCP was a better value than having only 90% of them available in DVR.