Which Macbook For Video Editing?

[ericjspencley]

Looking to purchase a new MacBook fairly soon. I do 4k video editing on Final Cut Pro for YouTube spending maybe 1-2 hours a day doing editing. I really have no problem with exporting times taking forever but I want the timeline to be smooth. I make instructional woodworking videos so I can always work on projects while I am exporting videos. It's not crucial to be editing 4k in real time since I currently use proxies and don't care about the regraded quality while editing. I currently use proxies to make my machine run somewhat smooth and while it's tolerable, I definitely want to upgrade soon.

Current Machine:

Early 2011 Macbook Pro 15"
256 GB SSD
AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory
Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with 6MB shared L3 cache

My budget is right around $2,500 but definitely do not need to spend all of that money if I don't need to.

I know that I can get a lot more power out of an iMac but I think I still want the portability out of a MacBook so I can sit on the couch and move around.

I guess the question is how much power do I really need? Can I get away with the base 15" model or do I need to step up to the higher tier?

Thanks for any tips or advice!

 

[iluvmacs99]

Looking to purchase a new MacBook fairly soon. I do 4k video editing on Final Cut Pro for YouTube spending maybe 1-2 hours a day doing editing. I really have no problem with exporting times taking forever but I want the timeline to be smooth. I make instructional woodworking videos so I can always work on projects while I am exporting videos. It's not crucial to be editing 4k in real time since I currently use proxies and don't care about the regraded quality while editing. I currently use proxies to make my machine run somewhat smooth and while it's tolerable, I definitely want to upgrade soon.

Current Machine:

Early 2011 Macbook Pro 15"
256 GB SSD
AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory
Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with 6MB shared L3 cache

My budget is right around $2,500 but definitely do not need to spend all of that money if I don't need to.

I know that I can get a lot more power out of an iMac but I think I still want the portability out of a MacBook so I can sit on the couch and move around.

I guess the question is how much power do I really need? Can I get away with the base 15" model or do I need to step up to the higher tier?

Thanks for any tips or advice!

To edit 4K video without any timeline lag, you will need 3 things -- 16Gb of ram for your computer, very FAST SSD storage drive for timeline cache and 8Gb Vram and up desktop class GPU like an RX580 or a Vega 64. Actually a powerful GPU is what you need even for your current Macbook Pro as the Radeon HD 6490M with 256Mb is simply not enough to deal with 4K proxies or not. 256Mb perhaps is ok for 1080p, but it is too small for 4K so you'll have major timeline lag as it swaps in memory in and out.

If you are looking to upgrade to the current Macbook Pro, you will need to invest in a Vega unit as the stock Intel HD graphics GPU is ok for light 4K editing, but will lag as it isn't meant to do complex 4K editing. You need a Vega 20 with 4Gb of VRAM, 16Gb of ram and something like a 1Tb SSD to provision some space for timeline cache to even give you more timeline performance benefits. Otherwise, you'll need to work on proxies and performance wise might not be monumental, but rather anemic. You can get a base 15" base model, but you will need to invest on an external GPU like a Vega 64 or at least a Radeon RX580, but it won't be as portable as a 15" Vega unit, because you need the external GPU to do most of the complex 4K rendering before you can export to the final master file. With the Vega, the GPU is built-in, but the built-in GPU isn't meant for full production 4K editing as it doesn't have a lot of VRAM compared to the desktop class GPU.

 

[ericjspencley]

So what if I just do 1080p? Does this drastically change the discussion?

 

[iluvmacs99]

So what if I just do 1080p? Does this drastically change the discussion?

Absolutely. 4K is 4 times the data of 1080p, so the requirements for fluid 4K editing is more demanding than 1080p. What some people do, including myself mostly, is to transcode and compress the original 4K footage into 1080pHD and what that does is that, it will improve sharpness, lower noise and better detail retention against a standard 1080pHD camera could achieve, while allowing fluid and seamless timeline editing with less hardware.

 

[ericjspencley]

Absolutely. 4K is 4 times the data of 1080p, so the requirements for fluid 4K editing is more demanding than 1080p. What some people do, including myself mostly, is to transcode and compress the original 4K footage into 1080pHD and what that does is that, it will improve sharpness, lower noise and better detail retention against a standard 1080pHD camera could achieve, while allowing fluid and seamless timeline editing with less hardware.

That's definitely the route I want to go then. I've been thinking about it more and more and the return on investment of producing 4k content on YouTube is not going to offset the extra expense of the machine.

In this case, could I get away with a 13" macbook pro or the base 15"?

 

[iluvmacs99]

Depending which Macbook Pro has the Apple T2 chip. The T2 chip can speed up media transcoding speed for a significant margin when combined with Quicksync to a h.264/h.265 container file.

So, if you're planning to transcode 4K h.264/h.265 footage into 1080pHD using Handbrake or Videoproc without major loss of quality in the fastest time; you will want a Macbook that comes with the T2 chip. If you're transcoding from 4K ProRes or 4K raw files to 1080p Pro Res, then consider getting more cores/threads to speed up the transcoding. Having said that, all the latest Macbook Pros without discrete GPU comes with the standard Intel GPU which is faster than your AMD 6490M and adequate for 1080pHD.