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M1 Ultra Mac Studio vs. M1 Max MacBook Pro
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It's quite simple really.
Video editing is one of the most demanding things you can do with such a computer. I am not going to say it is the most demanding thing because I know as soon as I type that someone will reply with something else which is indeed even more demanding. But yes it is.
Seriously though, if a (in this case) mac can deal with heavy video editing then it most likely can deal with everything else too, apart perhaps from video gaming.
As to the actual export time. You don't always have as much time as you want to deliver a video. Time constraints at any point can be a reality. A few hours (for one project or multiple) saved during exporting can be a few hours you can do other things including...editing. Add to that that when you work for someone else you might be under extra pressure to deliver on time, export time can be quite important.
Say you need to reliver by 7am. For whatever reason you delivered by 5am. Only that the person paying you tells you of a last second change, or something you managed to miss, or whatever. So you not only have to do the change(s), but also export and deliver it on time. Of course before you deliver you have to check to make sure the exported video works and there are no glitches, noise, etc at any point. The longer the video the more time every one of these steps take. Depending on the details you can miss on the deadline, by far, and risk losing money and/or a client.
I am not saying I disagree with you with the focus that exporting time receives, but there is good reason it is there.
There is always the joke that (some) youtubers make videos on the video making capabilities of macs so show how good or bad they are at it, solely for the purpose of making videos on the subject. As an owner of a tiny channel on youtube, I find this hilarious though obviously not always true.
M1 Max and M1 Ultra are very good. Think the power of M1 Max will be enough for most. All the M1 chips are very good
I think in this context, most Youtubers have the luxury of letting it run over night. It's one thing to post a video a couple of hours late v being back charged 20k an hour for down time.
As for the most demanding thing, the water gets muddied here with encode/decode on the SoC, both for comparison with competitors or trying to extrapolate performance to non video tasks
With businesses, its running various mathematical/statistical computations or 3D modeling of such complexity you max out the Macs processing. Of course computer games have been used a lot as formable examples as they can demand all a computer is capable of both CPU/GPU processing. Servers is an another example of extreme processing that Macs aren't really designed for.
If we think about some of the scientific applications out there I'm reasonably sure working on a few 4K video feeds is nothing in comparison.
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Wonderful perspective, she had a another video from 4 months ago
"What use are awesome specs if it doesn't actually speed up your creative process"
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Theoretically, the percentage of time saved for the 'mega' job is amazing.
I think back to years ago when I ran a design studio and used to output C4D 3D animations on the G4 and G5 Quad for an unimaginably long time. It wasn't until Jobs "bought" the intel chip that I got amazing results on the regular iMac C2D.
However, for the average user, the time savings are not as high as I might think, for reasons I'll explain later.
For professional users, as I see the benefits are not really that high either. If someone have experience in producing large 3D animations, they will know : the speed of a PC is not as fast as the support provided by a render farm, even if the PC is a workstation.
But if it's just a few minutes or a dozen minutes of formal 3D animation output with complex scenes and lighting settings, yes, a modern standard fast computer can already provide the time cost that a "personal level" can afford.
But as mentioned above, if the "personal level" is used to undertake large scale computing, then I don't think there is much difference between now and then (I recall the good old days of output on SGI in school), in general, as long as there are no render farm, really big computing jobs still take a long time to compute. Think about it, how long does it take to finish a 30 minute or even an hour or more animate that requires 60 pic per second? Especially nowadays when we talk about high quality animation, at least 5K resolution or more.
So even though I'm no longer in the industry, I think things haven't changed much. When it comes to really huge jobs, it's always the render farm that are needed.
So when it comes to saving that little bit of time, what are the benefits? It depends on how workers use their time, that is to say, I actually often see many people trying to pursue higher scores, chasing various hardware tested by Youtubers, and get computers that are "several minutes faster", but the things they spend the most time on in their daily lives, well .... IG, FB, YT, "Like OR Dislike" .... etc. These things. Maybe the time consumed in those things is more than "a few minutes faster".
Say “ghoti”… Interestingly, the plural of ghoti is ghoti (not ghotis or ghoties).
The original idea of Latin letters (or their Greek or even Phoenician predecessors) was to provide tools for phonemic orthography where a single letter represents a single phoneme. English orthography is highly nonphonemic, i.e. it is often difficult to guess the correct pronunciation of a written word.
Gerard Nolst Trenité demonstrated this beautifully in his poem “The Chaos”.
Not just 3D.We went all in on Silicon Graphics because the mathematically simple pixel transposition, 90° image rotate, would take too long on Mac. Efficiency improvements justified the 100k each investment.( in 1995 dollars)
It may speed up the process coming from intel machine, but an M1 Air would give identical audio performance, IF it had the same mic and camera. Video export would suffer but you can process overnight.
Same with the Studio, although that is obviously a review unit from Apple. Smart buy is the Max, invest the savings elsewhere in production.
I am surprised. Do you use zoom as audio only? I have GPU acceleration turned off in both zoom and teams but still my Mac could take off anytime with that fan speed. 2019 16” Mac.
It’s less when I don’t use an external 4K monitor but still a lot of heat and drains the battery. There are many with the same configuration in the office who complain that their battery lasts for less than 2 hours with zoom on.
Pretty sure one of the reviews showed the system report and confirmed that there were 6 on the Ultra - but has it been confirmed that the Max has 4 (...i.e. that two of the 4 ports don't share a controller)?
...because the Ultra is two Max's joined together - and half of 6 is 3 (which is what the MacBook Pros have, too).
Of course, Apple doesn't have to use all the SoC's ports in every application, and it's possible that some of the SoCs ports can be configured for different functions (e.g. the MBPs will need an internal DisplayPort).
1. Because video editing is arguably the most CPU/GPU-intensive task for a home computer, so that’s a good choice to put these monster machines through their paces. Do you really think you’d tax an M1 Ultra by using MS Office or even compiling code? These computers wouldn’t even notice.
2. A video editor will post comparisons on video editing because he doesn’t do those other things. You wouldn’t expect a ship’s captain to post a video comparing flying two different airplanes.
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It's worth actually watching the video, since the conclusion is pretty much that, even with the faster export times, the Max is going to be more than enough for most people... and he spends as much time explaining how the actual editing process is perfectly smooth on both systems.
Anyway, I'm not even a pro video editor and I've occasionally been in the situation of needing to transcode a dozen videos for a website, or repeatedly export movie in multiple formats... if I was doing that as the day job, those 2-minute savings would add up to a lot.
Again, that subject is explicitly discussed in the video - they're doing that because that's what they know and can discuss intelligently - sure, they could probably find some benchmarks for serious-callers 2D graphics, 3D modelling, machine learning or physical modelling - but would they be able to interpret the results or spot the 'gotchas'? it's really for users in other fields to come forward and review performance in other applications.
If you look at the various reviews on YouTube there are plenty of examples of things like Blender - but these sound like a huge piece of string that depend on how you configure and use the software and whether the specific software takes full advantage of the unique features of Apple Silicon. (Actually, it sounds like even the video tests are iffy until the next version of FCPX - which Apple used for their performance comparisons - comes out).
I think the take-home is that the M1 Max/Ultra are excellent for CPU-based stuff, excellent for graphics stuff written for Apple Silicon - especially if it uses the media engine or neural engine - but pretty mediocre for raw, brute-force GPU power, where you're probably much better off with PC hardware assembled to meet your specific needs.
Exactly. Let’s also not forget that export time is just an example of a task in video editing. When editing a video, you’re doing many tasks back to back, waiting for one to complete & render before applying another edit/filter/effect. Saving a few minutes each time can equate to hours and hours each week.
I need an M1 of any lineage in my life. Currently using an Intel MacBook Pro for encoding a bunch of HEVC HDR video and the poor thing is well and truly out of its depth. Barely keeping its head above water 
There are always advantages in video editing with speed. Like when your client realizes a change needs to happen in a 1 hour program that airs in 3 hours. The faster computer just might get that done. Or you have an entire days worth of virtual programming to export in 2 different formats. Don’t forget the QC process that happens which is real time that’s added to that. Faster is always better.
If you are making a deadline, encoding speed matters. If you are working with feature length projects, encoding speed matters. If you just want to make an output and continue editing, encoding speed matters. And an extra 2 grand for better performance is very worth it for many of us. Editors want the most responsive system possible.
Working with music production and audio post using lots of orchestral sample libraries I need ram. 128GB is a sweet spot but I wish there could be a configuration with less graphic cores and thereof cheaper option since I don't need that.
There are many demanding tasks out of video editing. What about people who design huge resolution posters, or making 3d movies, or making iOS apps and games.