Returning my M1 MBP and will rebuy mbp16 :(

[beastforum]

I love this MacBook Pro m1 and for most things its just perfect. What I can't understand is , in Final Cut Pro x, I can scrub through 4k video like butter. I can colour grade and its like butter. I add a cross dissolve and it tanks. every single time. I have to render it to get it to not drop frames. Seen lots of videos on YouTube that say its a dream for video editing. I don't see that.

I am using fuji xt4 4k dci footage and also normal 4k from the Sony a7s iii.

Anyone else getting this?

 

[KPOM]

I love this MacBook Pro m1 and for most things its just perfect. What I can't understand is , in Final Cut Pro x, I can scrub through 4k video like butter. I can colour grade and its like butter. I add a cross dissolve and it tanks. every single time. I have to render it to get it to not drop frames. Seen lots of videos on YouTube that say its a dream for video editing. I don't see that.

I am using fuji xt4 4k dci footage and also normal 4k from the Sony a7s iii.

Anyone else getting this?

Which model? 16GB or 8GB? Have you upgraded to the latest version of Final Cut Pro (no longer X)?

 

[beastforum]

Its the 16gb model and yeah running there latest Final Cut Pro.

 

[TehFalcon]

Well yeah, this is to be expected isn't it? Apple isn't going to make their base models perform better than the current high end models they are selling. The huge performance gains are to replace last gen 13" and to give a taste of what's going to come eventually to the 16" and other high end Macs!

The M2/M1X that will be in the 16" is going to blow away the current 16", it's gonna be great! Hold out if you can

 

[beastforum]

Well yeah, this is to be expected isn't it? Apple isn't going to make their base models perform better than the current high end models they are selling. The huge performance gains are to replace last gen 13" and to give a taste of what's going to come eventually to the 16" and other high end Macs!

The M2/M1X that will be in the 16" is going to blow away the current 16", it's gonna be great! Hold out if you can

Erm , no not really. Its been touted as amazing at video editing. It also benchmarks higher than any other Mac in single core and higher than the top 16" map in multicore. Apple showed on their release that it can edit 3x4k clips at a time. Maybe it can but if it can't do a cross dissolve on 1x4k clip to the next 4k clip without bombing then I don't see any appeal for the m1 tbh

 

[TehFalcon]

Erm , no not really. Its been touted as amazing at video editing. Apple showed on their release that it can edit 3x4k clips at a time. Maybe it can but if it can't do a cross dissolve on 1x4k clip to the next 4k clip without bombing then I don't see any appeal for the m1 tbh

It is amazing at video editing, compared to the models it replaced, by a lot. I think you are expecting it to work miracles when it's a first gen CPU for Mac's, and their entry level one at that.

 

[beastforum]

In playback its fine. Its the transitions. If only there was a way for it too automatically render the transitions only, or to render them first then it would be fine. Im not expecting it to blow away a Mac Pro but I have a surface book 3 at work that doesn't tank AT ALL when adding cross dissolves in resolve.

 

[beastforum]

Ive also tried on this M1 using resolve 17.1 beta and its worse than final cut for tanking with dissolves.

 

[Amenard]

Never buy first gen anything if your workflow depends on it. I always wait for at least one revision. Computers are too complex now to expect bug free 1st gen releases.

 

[beastforum]

Gutted as I love the m1 but I feel it’s been overhyped massively for video editing.

 

[Quackers]

Or something's wrong.

 

[vigilant]

The Macbook Pro M1 has a significant amount of outstanding things that blows my MacBook Pro 16 out of the water in every day use. I have an MacBook Pro 16 that I’m selling for a MacBook Pro M1. I’ve been working on my wife’s MacBook Air base model, and it is literally beating every ounce of life out of my MacBook Pro 16 in every single “every day life” scenario. You are saying you are upset because a single task you do doesn’t measure up... so your frustrated that one single thing you do is giving you something that isn’t convenien? News flash, I tried to hand the MacBook Air of my wife’s, to someone that is blind, and they didn’t get their sight back. They definitely didn’t start walking on water.

Theres trade offs when theres a hardware transition. It’s AMAZING that running applications that are Intel built have at least to me identical performance to my MacBook Pro 16. If doing a cross dissolve not being real time is a deal breaker, sure return it. Is that the one grip? I know I can gripe about the M1 MacBook Air that my wife has. The biggest one is that while an MacBook Pro 16 literally sounds like it’s about to try to leave orbit, and is slow, and laggy during a conference call, because Intel sucks, I can do the same thing on my wife’s passively cooled MacBook Air, and after ending the call it slows down by a lot for like 30 seconds.

Here’s another tip, if the President of the United States muses about injecting bleach as a cure all for COVID, don’t do it. Sure, it may kill COVID, but you may not like the side effects.

Everything’s got trade offs.

 

[Maxwells_Equations]

The M1 is great for what it is marketed for...is it a 16" 5600M with gobs of ram and a dGPU? No.

Does it have the multicore power of a 16? no.

Can it read a codec well? yes.

Is that a measure of it's power? No

/thread

 

[x3sphere]

Well yeah, this is to be expected isn't it? Apple isn't going to make their base models perform better than the current high end models they are selling. The huge performance gains are to replace last gen 13" and to give a taste of what's going to come eventually to the 16" and other high end Macs!

The M2/M1X that will be in the 16" is going to blow away the current 16", it's gonna be great! Hold out if you can

FWIW, it does outperform the 16” more often than not actually. I do not do any video editing but code compiling on the M1 has been faster for me. Most benchmarks have the M1 ahead as well.

Maybe op’s issue is something that can be fixed through optimization. Final Cut Pro is optimized for Apple Silicon right? Have you tried running the regular version through Rosetta to see if the same performance issue occurs? It could be some kind of issue with the M1 build. If a Surface Book 3 is performing fine I'd suspect this is something that could be fixed through software.

 

[Amenard]

The Macbook Pro M1 has a significant amount of outstanding things that blows my MacBook Pro 16 out of the water in every day use. I have an MacBook Pro 16 that I’m selling for a MacBook Pro M1. I’ve been working on my wife’s MacBook Air base model, and it is literally beating every ounce of life out of my MacBook Pro 16 in every single “every day life” scenario. You are saying you are upset because a single task you do doesn’t measure up... so your frustrated that one single thing you do is giving you something that isn’t convenien? News flash, I tried to hand the MacBook Air of my wife’s, to someone that is blind, and they didn’t get their sight back. They definitely didn’t start walking on water.

Theres trade offs when theres a hardware transition. It’s AMAZING that running applications that are Intel built have at least to me identical performance to my MacBook Pro 16. If doing a cross dissolve not being real time is a deal breaker, sure return it. Is that the one grip? I know I can gripe about the M1 MacBook Air that my wife has. The biggest one is that while an MacBook Pro 16 literally sounds like it’s about to try to leave orbit, and is slow, and laggy during a conference call, because Intel sucks, I can do the same thing on my wife’s passively cooled MacBook Air, and after ending the call it slows down by a lot for like 30 seconds.

Here’s another tip, if the President of the United States muses about injecting bleach as a cure all for COVID, don’t do it. Sure, it may kill COVID, but you may not like the side effects.

Everything’s got trade offs.

I think you're blowing this out of proportion.

The OP gave an opinion based on his personal experience. He isn't trashing the M1 tech, he's just displeased with his purchase since it can't work in is use case while his previous mac could. Will it be fixed later on, absolutly! But if the OP has to work now, I understand why he want to go back a step.

I'd put a bit of the blame on many YT channel gushing over every new product with artificial benchmark instead of trying to do real work with said device.

 

[zhenya]

This is a bug not a fundamental problem with the computer. Which is why you don’t buy a brand new device like this if you have work that absolutely must be done on it. Especially one switching to an entirely new processor platform.

Sucks but I’m sure it will be fixed. Just depends on whether you can stand to wait it out or not. Sounds like you can’t!

 

[x3sphere]

This is a bug not a fundamental problem with the computer. Which is why you don’t buy a brand new device like this if you have work that absolutely must be done on it. Especially one switching to an entirely new processor platform.

Sucks but I’m sure it will be fixed. Just depends on whether you can stand to wait it out or not. Sounds like you can’t!

Completely agree. As good as the performance on the M1 is I don't recommend it for anything mission critical. There are undoubtedly some edge case issues you'll run into, particularly with more complicated apps - just part of the early adopter experience really.

 

[ArPe]

I love this MacBook Pro m1 and for most things its just perfect. What I can't understand is , in Final Cut Pro x, I can scrub through 4k video like butter. I can colour grade and its like butter. I add a cross dissolve and it tanks. every single time. I have to render it to get it to not drop frames. Seen lots of videos on YouTube that say its a dream for video editing. I don't see that.

I am using fuji xt4 4k dci footage and also normal 4k from the Sony a7s iii.

Anyone else getting this?

Answer: don’t trust YouTubers. NLEs and compositing apps will always work from background rendering and temp caches even if it’s not obvious to some people. True proxy free work requires dedicated accelerators like the Afterburner.

 

[vigilant]

The M1 is great for what it is marketed for...is it a 16" 5600M with gobs of ram and a dGPU? No.

Does it have the multicore power of a 16? no.

Can it read a codec well? yes.

Is that a measure of it's power? No

/thread

Right... from what I’ve read people are responding based on experience... but keep telling people here that they are wrong because of “blah blah blah Intel Master Race”... I can’t help but feel like your time would be better spent drilling holes in your muffler so your car can sound faster than it is...

You can reply, or not... but I’d rather not have a discussion with someone that hyper generalizes like you did.

So have fun.

 

[s66]

The core problem is always the same: people believing youtube "reviews" as if those making these videos care about the wellbeing of the viewers.

It's a curse on every single new product nowadays, not just Apple products.

All the youtubers ever care about is themselves, their popularity, their clicks, their advertising revenue. So the more sensational, the more clickbait: the better for them.
They don't care about you: so stop looking to them for getting good advice.

Just say no to watching the damned things.

My motto: If they can't write it up coherently: it's not worth my time watching it. I can speed read much faster than a talking head on 2x fast forward can get the info across. Moreover I don't need their ugly face, let alone mentions of sponsors and more hidden advertising.

Yes these M1 macs are very impressive, but they remain entry level machines. If you needed a high end machine before, wait with replacing yours till Apple releases Apple Silicon based high end machines. Nothing but common sense needed there.

 

[1240766]

Consider software support as well...software shops will most likely stop releasing updates and new features for Intel Macs... like it or not, Intel Macs are heritage....

 

[ctjack]

Apple showed on their release that it can edit 3x4k clips at a time.

That was the trick. They edited Apple ProRes native video, so that went smooth. In real life, you can see a lot of videos on YT, that M1 is better than previous intel 13 inchers, but worse than 16 inch or win counterparts with dGPU.
Also there are news that the quality of fast encoding is lower than on intel. Your final result is compressed with lower quality. I remember this problems back in 2006-2008 when gpu hardware acceleration first turned on for usual consumers. So gpu hardware acceleration was fast at rendering but delivered worse quality than CPU rendering.
Nowadays they fixed it, but we can see that similar problems persist.
M1 is like an iphone and ipad - unbelievably good at playback. But that doesn't mean it is better elsewhere.
For example M1 stutters and breaks a sweat on 8k HDR videos on YT, while my win laptop doesn't care if it is 1080p or 8k hdr.

 

[UBS28]

Erm , no not really. Its been touted as amazing at video editing. It also benchmarks higher than any other Mac in single core and higher than the top 16" map in multicore. Apple showed on their release that it can edit 3x4k clips at a time. Maybe it can but if it can't do a cross dissolve on 1x4k clip to the next 4k clip without bombing then I don't see any appeal for the m1 tbh

The M1 has various specialized chips rather than general purpose processors like AMD and Intel has.

So at specialized task, it can score higher if it fits within one of the specialized chips in the M1.

If none of the specialized chips of the M1 is suitable for a particular task, then I am not surprised it will tank.

 

[UBS28]

Consider software support as well...software shops will most likely stop releasing updates and new features for Intel Macs... like it or not, Intel Macs are heritage....

I bet it is easier for developers to update a x86 Mac version next to their Windows x86 version.

I would be more concerned with developers even paying less attention to the Mac version of their software with ARM Mac’s.

 

[vigilant]

I am not pretty, not even my wife cares what I think.

The biggest problem in my life isn’t that everything is running shockingly well, but applying a cross fade may take slightly longer.

I’ll say, again, my wife’s MacBook Air M1 is truly shockingly good. On the vast majority of things, it’s better than my MacBook Pro 16. Sure, theres a handful of things there slower. I couldn’t even properly define those use cases, but they are rare.

I think we are in agreement that M1 Macs are shockingly punching outside of their weight class. I tried licking my wife’s M1 MacBook Air. I don’t think I’m immune to COVID now.

I will say, that overall, my wife’s MacBook Air is the most delightful computer I’ve ever used. That is my opinion. It has no fan. Generally, when I do things on it, it’s shockingly faster than my sold MacBook Pro 16. Does it slow down? Yes, but the thermal barrier is very different on the air compared to an Intel MacBook Pro.

The best way I can compare it is when I was younger, (I’m 38) a car dealer told me that driving a Toyota 4 cylinder engine is the equivalent to Fords V6. Okay, sure. If you’re driving around the city, in a 4 cylinder engine, it feels “peppier” than a Ford V6. The Intel processor is the 4 cylinder engine. If you have a well built V6 car, everything overall is just so much more responsive. It’s a ton of intangible things that you notice, but can’t properly define. Sure, the Toyota 4 Cylinder engine goes through stop lights at marginally close speeds at a traffic light. Thats fine, and cute. The M1, while it doesn’t solve all of the worlds problems, shows a shocking ability to do far better than anyone expected. The original posters single complaint, to me at least, feels like complaining about the cost of gas for a V6 vehicle. It’s a single issue. Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not. It could be user error. He seems really proud of that one single issue.