Macbook Air Early 2015 video editing

[kogutm]

Hello everybody !

I have been only windows user.
Since I own iphone and watch and like apple ecosystem, so I decided to buy Macbook Air to learn the macOS software ( So far I really like it ) I have never own any imac or any macbook before or never have a pleasure to test macOS.

I recently bought:
MacBook Air Early 2015
4 GB Ram
128 SSD
11.4 Big Sur

I am having problems with video editing, video is choppy all the time. I can't play any video form Gopro. I record 4K and slow motion. It works good on 1080p h.264.

I try using : Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 , IMovie
As I mention before this laptop was bought to get macOS better.
I know it's not high end Macbook Air, but is there anyway to make it work to edit videos ?

 

[stumblingfalk]

I think you are going to struggle with highly compressed h.264/265 footage from action cams, drones and consumer range cameras in general and especially on such weak hardware.

Those compression algorithms are brutal. That stuff is often hard even on present day hardware, regardless if pc or Mac. My old 2015 pc laptop with an i7/860 really has a hard time with such files as well and occasionally even my modern i7/2080 laptop starts to choke in Premiere on 4k h.26x from certain cameras with some very basic effects applied.

There's only two real workarounds that might help, lowering playback resolution in Premiere can help some and/or re-encode the footage to a more uncompressed or lower resolution format first (or create proxies), then edit.

Playback only in dedicated video player apps might be different on an app to app basis tho, try different players.

 

[xboxbml]

Hello everybody !

I have been only windows user.
Since I own iphone and watch and like apple ecosystem, so I decided to buy Macbook Air to learn the macOS software ( So far I really like it ) I have never own any imac or any macbook before or never have a pleasure to test macOS.

I recently bought:
MacBook Air Early 2015
4 GB Ram
128 SSD
11.4 Big Sur

I am having problems with video editing, video is choppy all the time. I can't play any video form Gopro. I record 4K and slow motion. It works good on 1080p h.264.

I try using : Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 , IMovie
As I mention before this laptop was bought to get macOS better.
I know it's not high end Macbook Air, but is there anyway to make it work to edit videos ?

4gb ram will hurt you.. Not sure 8gb would help either. I don't do video editing on mine, but it works well for my use case. Pretty sure the new M1 Air would do well, but a bit pricey for me atm... I would always max out on ram and storage if you can afford it..

 

[DenisK]

I had the same issue and was surprised that my wife's (2017) MacBook 12 could play GoPro 4k vids and my maxed out MBA couldn't. I dont think you can playback any 4k video footage on MBAs of that generation (needless to say their screens are only a fraction of the resolution that you're trying to playback), leave alone editing - although for editing you can actually use proxies in FCP and it would do just fine. Otherwise, I did edit quality 1080p vids on an i7 MBA from 2012 with 8 gigs of ram in FCP without any issues. To reach 4k for playback and editing I made a jump to last years' iPad pro (Luma Fusion) and a 2019 MBP with plenty of ram - to do that effortlessly. You need a Mac with a retina display and beefy ram and an extra graphics card as a bonus, or a newer iPad. While the latter works fine for editing I prefer FCP and an extra monitor - so I chose a newer MBP. Good luck!

 

[capamac]

Transcode the video or use proxy video. It'll run much faster. Pretty sure Premiere will let you do this; not so sure iMovie allows it.

I have Final Cut Pro X and I know it supports transcoding and proxy.

Transcoding will convert the math-heavy codec into a simpler, faster and larger one. (you'll need more drive storage space.)

Another option than can be used in place of transcoding or with transcoding is proxy video, where you edit the 4k footage using a lower resolution (say, 720p, or 1080p). Then during export you can export to 4k if you want. Final Cut Pro X supports this for sure and pretty sure Premiere does as well. iMovie does not support it, pretty sure.

128 gigs of storage isn't much; consider using an external USB drive for keeping your video projects.

 

[Geezerviser]

Hi, guys. Have the same problem and am looking for the solutions to resolve it... but I see that the only one is to buy a new laptop)) Unfortunatelly (or maybe fortunatelly), I understand that 4gb ram is not enough for video editing, but I didn’t have a lot of options when I was buying my first mac. Well, it seems that for now I can only use online video editing apps like https://www.fastreel.com/video-merger.html. Maybe in 2-3 months I’ll be able to purchase a newer and faster one.

have you tried any other software?