I regularly edit technical videos (think voice over static text/images) and I’m trying to decide which of the MBAs in the title would yield better performance. Videos can be up to one hour, but more often under 20 mins. I use iMovie because the editing is pretty simple, mostly a matter of chopping and gluing things together, with some audio editing. For the past couple years, I’ve been relying on an M2/8GB Mac Mini, but I’m tired of the long export times. I’m not sure how video editing loads on CPU vs. GPU vs. RAM. Any suggestions?
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Video editing: M3/24GB vs M4/16GB?
- Thread starter 123123123
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The export times you are getting depend on
1. whether the project have been rendered during the editing process (or just viewed as a preview), and
2. the performance of the video encode/decode engines built into the Mac's SoC.
Apple's editing software FCP or iMovie is very efficient in its RAM requirements, and the speed of exports of a pre-rendered timeline comes down to the speed of the media engine hardware.
Further RAM probably won't influence the speed of encoding greatly.
Having the project render temp storage on the internal storage will give the best export speeds.
The two main improvements that the M4 has over the M3 is two more CPU Efficiency cores, and a higher Performance core clock speed.
The video engines may be improved but I don't think any improvement is significant.
I think for your sort of editing the most noticeable improvement would be with the M4 Mac, even if you can only afford 16GB RAM.
But the encode speed is not going to be hugely improved over your M2 Mac mini, but the additional CPU speed and RAM will help speed up the project rendering time.
Max SoCs are greatly faster at encoding because they have two video engines instead of the one in the base and Pro SoCs.
The other factor with video editing is that 512MB or 1TB internal storage makes everything much easier for longer projects, even if you use external storage.
1. whether the project have been rendered during the editing process (or just viewed as a preview), and
2. the performance of the video encode/decode engines built into the Mac's SoC.
Apple's editing software FCP or iMovie is very efficient in its RAM requirements, and the speed of exports of a pre-rendered timeline comes down to the speed of the media engine hardware.
Further RAM probably won't influence the speed of encoding greatly.
Having the project render temp storage on the internal storage will give the best export speeds.
The two main improvements that the M4 has over the M3 is two more CPU Efficiency cores, and a higher Performance core clock speed.
The video engines may be improved but I don't think any improvement is significant.
I think for your sort of editing the most noticeable improvement would be with the M4 Mac, even if you can only afford 16GB RAM.
But the encode speed is not going to be hugely improved over your M2 Mac mini, but the additional CPU speed and RAM will help speed up the project rendering time.
Max SoCs are greatly faster at encoding because they have two video engines instead of the one in the base and Pro SoCs.
The other factor with video editing is that 512MB or 1TB internal storage makes everything much easier for longer projects, even if you use external storage.
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I agree you're not going to see what I'd consider a "significant difference" from M2 to M4, regardless of RAM. If an export is taking 30 minutes now it might be down to 20 minutes; faster sure but not so much faster as to justify the cost.
You might look at a M4 Pro Mac mini, that's probably the best bang for the buck in terms of video processing.
You might look at a M4 Pro Mac mini, that's probably the best bang for the buck in terms of video processing.
@123123123
Last Friday you were asking “ I’m looking at getting either a Mini or a Studio.”
As I mentioned earlier, using a base M4 Max Studio will significantly speed up export times….
Last Friday you were asking “ I’m looking at getting either a Mini or a Studio.”
As I mentioned earlier, using a base M4 Max Studio will significantly speed up export times….
Yes – I’m mostly contrasting different scenarios, mostly driven by sales. M3 MBAs are getting significant discounts now, and it has me in decision paralysis…
To put it in context, the base Studio is $2400 (Canadian), the M4 Mini 16/512 around 1000, 24/512 is about 1250, M4 Pro 24/512 Mini around 1850, and the M4 MBA 16/512 and M3 24/512 both around 1500. I’m having trouble finding the sweet spot.
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From what you mention, the sweet spot is the M4 mini in the 24/512 configuration. Keep in mind that the Mac mini has a fan and the MacBook Air doesn’t, and it will throttle in sustained tasks such as a video export.