M1 Video Editing Setup Suggestions

[dpavid]

Bought an M1 for kicks and giggles with all the hype and now want to put this thing through the wringer. Adobe Creative Cloud is the bread and butter. I know it's not optimized for Apple Silicon yet. Here's the wish list.

Dual 4K monitors - lots of screen real estate, considering LG 27UK850-W.
Dock/Hub - CalDigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 Dock looks like a winner.
Storage - Need to milk that TB3 speed via dock. 4TB+, TB3 external HD or an external enclosure with dual or quad M2 or SSD should be sufficient. Not sure about the enclosure and drive choices.

OS/Apps on MacMini
Cache and Media files on External, maybe get a 3rd external Samsung T7 just for the cache files, not sure if that would help much.

Suggestions on hardware choices to make this a decent machine. Thanks in advance!

 

[pldelisle]

Dual 4K monitors - lots of screen real estate, considering LG 27UK850-W.

Or Dell U2720Q. Both are very nice monitors.

Dock/Hub - CalDigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 Dock looks like a winner.

I prefer the OWC https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderbolt-dock

Storage - Need to milk that TB3 speed via dock. 4TB+, TB3 external HD or an external enclosure with dual or quad M2 or SSD should be sufficient. Not sure about the enclosure and drive choices.

Why not going with a Thunderbolt NAS ? https://www.qnap.com/solution/thunderbolt3-nas/en-us/
Or https://www.amazon.ca/OWC-Express-4M2-4-Slot-Enclosure-OWCTB3EX4M2SL/dp/B07G5MHBW1 but reviews are very so-so. A Thunderbolt NAS with 4x Crucial/Samsung SATA SSDs + 2 NVME for caching seems the best to me. Expansive but top performer.

Cache and Media files on External, maybe get a 3rd external Samsung T7 just for the cache files, not sure if that would help much.

I'd keep cache on the primary internal SSD. A T7 is 3-5x slower than internal.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Cache and Media files on External, maybe get a 3rd external Samsung T7 just for the cache files, not sure if that would help much.

I remember in the old days they recommended three drives: one for the OS... one for media... one for cache/scratch.

But that was back when we were using old slow spinning hard drives. They were lucky to read/write at 100MB/s. The drives simply didn't have the bandwidth to quickly access multiple files at a time.

Today's SSDs, however, can read and write at 3GB/s... or 3,000MB/s. So I can't imagine why you'd need a 3rd external drive just for cache files. How big are these files?

I use Adobe Premiere but there's never anything major in my cache folders. Just a bunch of tiny files.

 

[dpavid]

I remember in the old days they recommended three drives: one for the OS... one for media... one for cache/scratch.

But that was back when we were using old slow spinning hard drives. They were lucky to read/write at 100MB/s. The drives simply didn't have the bandwidth to quickly access multiple files at a time.

Today's SSDs, however, can read and write at 3GB/s... or 3,000MB/s. So I can't imagine why you'd need a 3rd external drive just for cache files. How big are these files?

I use Adobe Premiere but there's never anything major in my cache folders. Just a bunch of tiny files.

You're probably right, those days are gone. I have mine set to auto-delete every 14 days to keep flushing it. I'll have to try it all on one drive.

 

[Michael Scrip]

I have mine set to auto-delete every 14 days to keep flushing it. I'll have to try it all on one drive.

Yeah give it a shot and see if it makes any difference.

I have multiple SSDs in my Windows system... but all my video editing stuff is on a single SSD. And I have the Cache in a folder on that same drive.

Here is what is in that folder:

Media Cache
Media Cache Files
Peak Files

Is that what you're talking about?

I admit that I don't quite understand what all these cache folders do. But I've never had any problems having it all on the same SSD.

And sometimes I edit from a Samsung T5 on my laptop... so everything is on the same single drive anyway.

 

[dpavid]

Yeah give it a shot and see if it makes any difference.

I have multiple SSDs in my Windows system... but all my video editing stuff is on a single SSD. And I have the Cache in a folder on that same drive.

Here is what is in that folder:

Media Cache
Media Cache Files
Peak Files

Is that what you're talking about?

I admit that I don't quite understand what all these cache folders do. But I've never had any problems having it all on the same SSD.

And sometimes I edit from a Samsung T5 on my laptop... so everything is on the same single drive anyway.

My current setup is a MacPro 2013 with an Areca TB2 64TB RAID5 that gets mirrored to a cloud backup. That RAID gets about 800-900MB on BMD disk speedtest. All my apps are on the MacPro with Cache and media on the RAID. The cache is all the audio waveforms, thumbnails, etc that Premiere creates when you import media. You can delete it all but Premiere will create them again when you open the project. No big deal. Just planning ahead for TB3 and Apple silicon as this system makes 8 years old in April. It has treated me well.

 

[Michael Scrip]

The cache is all the audio waveforms, thumbnails, etc that Premiere creates when you import media.

Gotcha... that's what I thought.

As long as your working drive is fast... which it is... I don't see why you'd need a separate drive just for cache files.

I might have a project with 30GB of video and audio files... but the cache files are tiny by comparison. That's why I never worried about them.

Hell... I remember back in the day when they recommended having a separate drive just for exporting! That's back when computers had difficulty reading from one drive and writing to another drive at the same time.

Luckily we don't have to worry about that anymore!