SkyNet Will Be Awake soon

A local fellow producer, who works for a couple of the big Hollywood studios, just did a test of 2 different systems up against the new M4 Mac Mini.

Mind you, this guy is so scary smart and has more knowledge about broadcast and film production technologies he's a walking encyclopedia. From "Jaws" to the original Battlestar Galactica and even Transformers he's as top-shelf as it gets. The point being, with exception to the late "Rob Art" from the BareFeats website I don't know anyone who's smarter or has more technical information than this guy. (name protected for obvious reasons.)

It was a render-time test of several streams of 4K footage all with color correction and various filters applied based on a DR 19 project. All the machines were fed the same project, un-rendered with no proxies.

The test beds were a 2020 iMac with 128GB RAM and, a 2019 (pre M chip) Mac Pro with the same amount of RAM and, the M4 Mac Mini 16GB RAM - NOT the Pro version.

The render time results:
- 2020 iMac - 4.74 mins
- 2019 Mac Pro - 3.25 mins
- 2024 M4 Mac Mini - 85 seconds.

WHAATTT!!!!???

Apple has effectively killed the Mac Pro now. Why in the world would you spend thousands of dollars - on ANY system when this little thing runs circles around all else? And it's the size of a double-decker ham sandwich to boot?!

So that's it: Combine that next-gen computing power with A.I. and Skynet will be alive and well by New Years.

See you guys on the food lines.

No more speculation, now I've got an M4 Mini. This thing just flies through general tasks and I had it re-render a DR 19 project that I deleted all the cache/render files and started fresh with a new output. It handled it like a hot knife through butter, done in seconds, not minutes.

Once I attach a TB4 NVMe external drive and move all my assets there this thing will just get faster as I won't be forcing it to double-duty by hosting the OS and all the working files on the same SSD. But, with 40Gb/s throughput there's no longer a need for a RAID. Just straight up external storage.

The damn thing is the size of a double-decker sandwich, you can barely notice it amongst the other equipment on my desk, but it literally has outperformed EVERY Mac Pro I've ever owned by a huge margin. I can't even see the need for the "pro" version M4 chip. I'm sure it's even more scary than this. No thanks, I'm not going to put more dollars into helping Apple create Skynet. hahaha

Holy computer takeover Batman!!