Can you recommend spec for Mac Studio

I'm deciding whether to upgrade my 2021 macbook pro M1 Max 64GB.

I'm an (amateur) youtuber - reviewing gadgets. Typically 10 min films in 4K.

I'm not especially interested in saving a little bit of rendering time. A few minutes either way doesn't make much odds to me, as I usually make one film a week at most. Usually less.

What I really AM interested in is masks, fusion stuff and special effects not slowing things down as I edit on the timeline. Especially as I get more into things like borisfx.

Will switching to a Mac studio make a significant difference to that? And if so, I wonder whether there is a really significant difference between an M2 Max and the Ultra, and the two different GPU core specs. In any event, I suspect 192GB of ram is overkill, but 128 is probably worth it?

Thanks in advance for any help.

As Uli mentioned in another thread, if you go for the 72 core GPU, you need the 128 GB RAM option, otherwise you will starve your GPUs of memory.

I can't speak from experience, but I suspect even the fastest M2 Ultra Studio won't give you exceptional performance in Fusion.

Can anyone else confirm this?

I have a maxed out Mac Studio and GPU is constantly maxed out.

Is there a standard Fusion project I could use to test the speed? I have only really started using Fusion since the M1 macs came out so I don't have anything to compare it to.

I have a maxed out Mac Studio and GPU is constantly maxed out.

I can't speak from experience, but I suspect even the fastest M2 Ultra Studio won't give you exceptional performance in Fusion.

Interesting. Thanks both. It sounds as if it may not be worth upgrading. Elvis, I’d be interested to know if by that you mean you have to stop work frequently and wait for it to catch up?

Yeah I should have given more context.

I have found the Mac Studio M1 Ultra and now the M2 Ultra to be very speedy and responsive.

The GPU maxed out comment was more about how the CPU doesn’t matter but Resolve uses the GPU heavily. I would always upgrade to whatever CPU/GPU config gave you the most GPU.

Last year when I had the M1 Ultra Mac Studio and a M1 Max MacBook Pro I was doing a documentary and would edit on the Mac Studio while I was rendering out on the MacBook Pro. The Mac Studio could render out a section about twice as fast as the MacBook Pro and I also found I could do about twice as much in real time. Denoise and Magic Mask all worked real time on the Mac Studio and would need to render a bit on the MacBook Pro.

I found the Mac Studio M2 Ultra to be even less likely to need to render and Resolve is for sure using all the GPU recourses it has available.

Over the last year I have stopped using After Effects and Apple Motion because I just don’t ever want to round trip. Fusion has filled that gap super well and for sure the extra power on the M2 Ultra helps.

and for context I am usually using Sony XOCN/XAVC or BRAW files on these docs.

That's interesting to know. My comment came from observations that the Fusion pipeline does not seem to make as much use of the GPU, but individual node effects appear to and the number of Fusion effects that are now GPU accelerated seems to be increasing. The MacBook Pro M1 Max in my signature is awesome for general Resolve grading and effects but is comparatively slow when it comes to Fusion. I and others on this forum have observed this and wondered if it is something that could be optimized by BMD when they get around to it (i.e., it's as if the Fusion pipeline introduces delays that you don't see with the nodes in the color page).

Just rambling at this point, lol. Cheers.

I feel like on the Fusion page it isn’t as fast as it could be but then if you take that same shot and go to the color page it renders so much faster.

Elvis, thanks, that’s helpful. So perhaps it is a worthwhile upgrade, not so much because of the time saving, but more because it makes it easier to explore and try out different creative options if you’re not getting bogged down in rendering timelines as much and can view twice as much in real time.

Did you do any editing on your old MBP and if so, is it much more enjoyable using the studio?

Yeah. I still edit on it all the time on set. I usually change the timelines to HD or 2K and do have to render more unlike when I am at home and can keep my timeline 4k and still do more in real time.

I have a maxed out Mac Studio and GPU is constantly maxed out.

Is there a standard Fusion project I could use to test the speed? I have only really started using Fusion since the M1 macs came out so I don't have anything to compare it to.

The Spaceship project on the Fusion product page (scroll) may not look like much, but it's pretty complex.
A maxed-out Studio Ultra needed 18 minutes and 48 seconds to render that into ProRes 4444 in Fusion standalone. While doing this, it was mainly maxing out the CPU-cores (other than Resolve).
My MBP (see sig) needed 58 minutes.

BTW, if anyone wants a DR benchmark project, in particular to compare PCs, PM please. I'd expect anything with a 4090 to be faster for DR, but not necessarily for Fusion.

If you need nice motion graphics with a fast software, get Apple's Motion. FCP-X generally integrates a bit better with DR than Premiere Pro. But Fusion effects in a DR timeline may generally slow you down, if these are not very simple ones. Rather do a Render in Place instead of buying expensive hardware.

Elvis and Uli (or anyone else), one more question!

For max 15 min films, 4K, but learning to do more and more special effects, do you have any sense of whether I would see any appreciable gains between buying an Ultra with 76 GPUs, as opposed to 60.

ie 60 core Ultra with 128GB ram and 4TB = 5999 GBP
76 core with 192 gB ram = 7799 GBP

Do you think I will see anything like nearly $2000 more fluidity in the timeline, improved render cache speed etc. As I say, not at this stage bothered by a few minutes either way in rendering the final thing.

It is for sure faster but that’s a lot of money for not too much more. I would pass if you are on the fence.

A wild suggestion would be to convert all your footage to ProRes before you edit. That will probably be the biggest bang for the buck. The M1 and M2 really take advantage of that.

That would be using something like EditReady to do the conversion or recording to an Atomos Ninja. You could try it with your MacBook Pro and see if it gives you a boost with the kind of content you are making.

Thanks Elvis, I record more or less everything on the Ninja already: ProRes 422.

I'm trying to imagine what 'for sure faster' but 'not too much more' actually feels like! What I really want is to sit in an Apple store and compare two machines, but they wont let people do that, so it is a bit of a punt.

Nearly 2K is a lot more, esp when you think you could buy a base model for that. Then again, would I kick myself for buying the cheaper machine later? I bought a top spec Macbook Pro 10 years ago, and it is still in service - perfectly good for my wife's browsing needs!

End of monologue

Oh yeah. If you already do ProRes then you are probably in a good spot.

I like to encourage people to spend a bit less and feel better about upgrading sooner. If you feel like $2000 is a hard spend then don't do it. Just feel better about selling the M2 Ultra and getting an M3 Ultra when they come out.

Or get an Ultrastudio 4k Mini and an LG OLED TV. That will be more fun.

Ha, the Ultrastudio looks rather above my pay grade! I am not sure I understand quite what it does/how it fits into the workflow.

Elvis and Uli (or anyone else), one more question!

For max 15 min films, 4K, but learning to do more and more special effects, do you have any sense of whether I would see any appreciable gains between buying an Ultra with 76 GPUs, as opposed to 60.

ie 60 core Ultra with 128GB ram and 4TB = 5999 GBP
76 core with 192 gB ram = 7799 GBP

Do you think I will see anything like nearly $2000 more fluidity in the timeline, improved render cache speed etc. As I say, not at this stage bothered by a few minutes either way in rendering the final thing.

I think it is impossible for most users to answer these sorts of questions as most of us don't have two such powerful machines to compare directly. There was a recent thread which went into detail about a similar topic which you may find useful. The posts by joema4 are well worth a read in any case as he definitely knows what he is talking about.

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=185131&p=966575#p966575

One thing I would suggest is that you could reduce your costs not insignificantly by getting just 1TB of internal storage instead of 4TB and using external SSDs, as these are way, way cheaper than internal Apple storage. They don't even have to be incredibly fast for most purposes.

Reading the thread, I think the big issue here is your use of Fusion. It's not clear how much you want or need to use Fusion but there are numerous posts (as Steve's here) about Fusion being problematic on Macs (particularly on Silicon Macs?). I don't use Fusion myself so can't comment directly. However, if you are not already deep into Fusion, perhaps consider Apple Motion instead as Uli mentons above. It is only £50 (last time I looked), it can do an awful lot of interesting stuff and it runs very well on Macs (given that it is made by Apple).

If you are shooting ProRes 4K on a Ninja, then you will have no problem with any of the machines you mention with editing and grading in Resolve. In fact your existing machine is more than good enough for any of this. I know - I have the same specced machine and I can grade 8K NRAW with no problem at all, as well as 4K ProRes Raw, BRAW etc. Motion is no problem either. Maybe investing in a quality monitor if you don't already have one would be a better move if you were to go down this path.

Assuming the M3 studio turns up next year, you may be better off, as a mother post recomended addressing your monitor upgrades in the mean time.
the m3 looks like it will have more CPU cores and faster GPU and -perhaps -praying- Apple will finally increase the base SSD config to a more useful size/price point. Mayne even add provision for secondary user accessible m.2 internal storage (yeah right!@0). the later may occur as optional apple drive because creator software and editing 8 or 12K 16bit footage is going to need a massive Internal SSD upgrade solution because Thunderbolt is maxed out.
One can expect the M3 will also have more base Ram. Overall It be much better for 3D and modelling. --if only because AI is becoming a big thing.
As a rule of thumb Historically Apple's odd numbered device generations are the sweet spot. so M1 /M3 / M5 ... are the ones to buy.

I'm very interested to these posts. Had thought about posting this stand alone but think it fits here pretty well.

I have a Mac Studio M2 Ultra coming in a month. Starting to think about storage. Will likely use my old OWC T2 Thunderbay4 for JBOD's (archive, Time Machine, personal data). But I need to replace my higher speed/size drives. One for footage that needs to be both fast and large, at least 16TB maybe larger. Then another for data from jobs. Maybe 8TB. Then something fast for cache/render. Probably 4-8 TB.

What are you using? Thoughts? Thanks.

Expecting no slowdown by Fusion effects (other than very simple ones) will be a disappointment.
Fusion is not really fast. I can only repeat myself: get Apple's Motion for ordinary motion graphics. It's easy to learn and blazing fast, since Apple is optimising for their hardware.
Fusion is rather aiming at complex VFX, like Flame or Nuke, and not the fastest of the three. Don't expect RT for those, even with maxed out hardware.

@Marshall:
Other than for backup purposes, it's SSD arrays these days. Even a single Thunderbolt device will be fast enough for formats with high throughput. Arrays will rather be for size in one box, but not really needed for speed.

I think it is impossible for most users to answer these sorts of questions as most of us don't have two such powerful machines to compare directly.

Yes, I was thinking that, but you never know!

There was a recent thread which went into detail about a similar topic which you may find useful. The posts by joema4 are well worth a read in any case as he definitely knows what he is talking about.
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=185131&p=966575#p966575

That's a very interesting thread. Thank you.

One thing I would suggest is that you could reduce your costs not insignificantly by getting just 1TB of internal storage instead of 4TB and using external SSDs, as these are way, way cheaper than internal Apple storage. They don't even have to be incredibly fast for most purposes.

Good point. I was thinking of perhaps having 2TB (to be sure of having enough of the superfast SSD spare), and then getting one of these, which gives me 16TB and RAID for about the same price as the difference between 2 and 8TB on the mac. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3TBV4T16/

Reading the thread, I think the big issue here is your use of Fusion. It's not clear how much you want or need to use Fusion but there are numerous posts (as Steve's here) about Fusion being problematic on Macs (particularly on Silicon Macs?). I don't use Fusion myself so can't comment directly. However, if you are not already deep into Fusion, perhaps consider Apple Motion instead as Uli mentons above. It is only £50 (last time I looked), it can do an awful lot of interesting stuff and it runs very well on Macs (given that it is made by Apple).

Hadn't thought of that. I'm self taught, started on Premier Pro, got really bogged down in after effects, then discovered Resolve and love it. Find Fusion so much more logical. Love that it is all part of the same workflow. I read that Motion is very different and more difficult to learn. But as you say, for £50 might be worth taking it for a spin!

If you are shooting ProRes 4K on a Ninja, then you will have no problem with any of the machines you mention with editing and grading in Resolve. In fact your existing machine is more than good enough for any of this. I know - I have the same specced machine and I can grade 8K NRAW with no problem at all, as well as 4K ProRes Raw, BRAW etc. Motion is no problem either. Maybe investing in a quality monitor if you don't already have one would be a better move if you were to go down this path.

I do find that adding certain effects, such as retiming, on the timeline does slow things to a crawl.

But a good quality monitor ... that's a whole different question!

I currently use a 34" ultrawide IPS: https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-34wk9 ... de-monitor

Have thought about switching to OLED or microled, but so far at least, only finding curved screens, which I imagine would not be great for video editing (I presume it would be more difficult to judge straight lines on a bendy screen. Of course there is this: https://www.corsair.com/uk/en/p/monitor ... 9030001-pe, but it is only 3,440 by 1,440 on a 45 inch screen, so I dont think that's any good. So far not finding any flat OLED ultrawide screens around 34".

Assuming the M3 studio turns up next year, you may be better off, as a mother post recomended addressing your monitor upgrades in the mean time.
As a rule of thumb Historically Apple's odd numbered device generations are the sweet spot. so M1 /M3 / M5 ... are the ones to buy.

From what I read, the problem is that the M3 ultra wont likely arrive till very late 24 or even 25. And if I wait till then, no doubt there will be a case for waiting for the M4. Also, my understanding is that the greatest gains have come from switching to apple silicon, and then sticking two chips together. I'm not sure there will be such an enormous step forward again in the next few years???

Thanks again everyone for all your thoughts. Really helpful and much appreciated.

If you re-time with optical flow, Speed Warp in particular, it can look very good, but will be slow.
Blend mode is RT and can suffice for many cases other than synthetic slo-mo.

Motion is not difficult, compared to that AEFX looks like an academic study and Fusion like rocket science

There are LG OLED monitors in 32" now. Flat, of course. Curved ones are good for timeline and editing only.

I second your sceptical thoughts about waiting.
While the first generation of the Ultra, the M1, was not yet optimised, the M2 Ultra is quite good. As usual with Apple, the top model is overpriced, the mid level has the better price/performance ratio. M3 won't be that much better. Judging from the new iPhones, which already use the new 3nm process, it'll give you a maximum of 20% more speed and some more power efficiency – probably not even both at the same time. And then, they may only trickle into the market or even be postponed, since the process seems to be very hard to handle by TSMC.
You need patience to even get an iPhone 15 right now, and since Apple is first of all a phone company these days, they rather will push those chips into phones than into computers, as long as demand is higher than wafer yield.

Motion is not difficult, compared to that AEFX looks like an academic study and Fusion like rocket science

Laughed out loud. I would have said the other way around between Fusion and AEFX.

There are LG OLED monitors in 32" now. Flat, of course. Curved ones are good for timeline and editing only.

Interesting, and what would you say they are bad for?

Bad for GUI. OLED may burn in.

Hadn't thought of that. I'm self taught, started on Premier Pro, got really bogged down in after effects, then discovered Resolve and love it. Find Fusion so much more logical. Love that it is all part of the same workflow. I read that Motion is very different and more difficult to learn. But as you say, for £50 might be worth taking it for a spin!

If you re-time with optical flow, Speed Warp in particular, it can look very good, but will be slow.
Motion is not difficult, compared to that AEFX looks like an academic study and Fusion like rocket science

I'm also entirely self taught coming from Final Cut Pro. I decided to learn Resolve last year when I saw that it was the only Mac program at that time that could be used for Nikon Raw. I did a lot of the free BMD tutorials to get to grips with Resolve properly but was put off learning Fusion because of the reported performance issues.

As I had spent some time learning Motion over the previous year or two, I figured that would be more than enough for my needs. I mainly used Mark Spencer's Ripple Training tutorials which are really excellent (he also does Fusion tutorials). I can't really comment on the relative difficulty in getting to grips with either program and it obviously depends on one's own ability, application and what one wants to do. Motion has that Apple-designed logical and consistent interface and it runs very well on the M1 MacBook Pro.

Ripple Training have a lot of free Motion tutorials on YouTube which are well worth a look. And there are some amazing and pretty complicated tutorials on YouTube by Simon Ubsdell who takes Motion to an entirely new level if you want to get a flavour of what can be done.

Ripple Training have a lot of free Motion tutorials on YouTube which are well worth a look. And there are some amazing and pretty complicated tutorials on YouTube by Simon Ubsdell who takes Motion to an entirely new level if you want to get a flavour of what can be done.

Thanks for the pointer. Must say, having invested some time getting my head round fusion, I'm loathe to give up on it. Plus I fear it will make the workflow more difficult having to switch back and forth between programmes. But I will go and watch some of those YT videos you suggest. Thanks.

For those who'd rather like to use Motion for speed, have a look at this video related to VFX Connect:

By choosing appropriate locations, formats and names you can use the same approach with Motion.

Back again. In the end, I went for a top spec model, but saved myself a bit on 4 rather than 8 gigs of SSD (thanks for that suggestion, Mickspixels).

One thing. I went for the top one mainly to futureproof and also FOMO (!). I thought I would go nowhere near needing 192 RAM at this stage. But to my amazement, I regularly see it as high as 150GB Ram used in the activity monitor, when resolve is running (alongside a few other apps, like photoshop, mail etc., but they don't account for much).

Is that normal?

My benchmark project needs a tad over 100 GB of RAM on the Ultra with 76 GPU cores.

One thing. I went for the top one mainly to futureproof and also FOMO (!). I thought I would go nowhere near needing 192 RAM at this stage. But to my amazement, I regularly see it as high as 150GB Ram used in the activity monitor, when resolve is running (alongside a few other apps, like photoshop, mail etc., but they don't account for much).

We try not to run anything in the background with Resolve if we can avoid it. I will run an internet browser if I need to upload/download files, or perhaps a TextEdit/Notepad app to jot down notes while I work. But other than that, that's it. If I'm rendering, I close out everything and let Resolve run by itself and just walk away.

Second that.
That's why it's quite demanding to run Fusion inside of DR. You can easily saturate the unified memory with a complex project. In my experience, Fusion standalone is more reliable.
Or rather spend a bit less on your main machine and have another one for additional tasks, from preparing stills to transcoding footage.

Am I right in saying that the reason for the software using as much ram as possible is because ram is faster to read and write than even the fast SSDs built into the latest models, therefore the more it stores in RAM, the faster it can process it.

If that is correct, then I suppose I am surprised not to see more performance gains over my 64GB MacBook Pro M1 Max.

And also, regarding running other tasks simultaneously ... surely that only matters if you are reaching the limit of RAM / GPU / CPU?

Even at 150GB RAM, I still have room to spare. Haven't yet checked percentage GPU / CPU usage whilst in resolve, but I would imagine that other programmes are using minimal resources when dormant (because editing in DR), and so this only comes into play when rendering.

??

Am I right in saying that the reason for the software using as much ram as possible is because ram is faster to read and write than even the fast SSDs built into the latest models, therefore the more it stores in RAM, the faster it can process it.

The common observation seems to be that Resolve will utilize as much GPU memory (VRAM) as it can get its hands on. As Apple silicon features a unified memory architecture where memory is shared across the system, most of the memory use you're seeing while running Resolve is probably from the GPU.

If that is correct, then I suppose I am surprised not to see more performance gains over my 64GB MacBook Pro M1 Max.

Noticeable performance gains between models and generations can vary depending on the task. This can sometimes lead to disappointment when things don't meet expectations. Maintaining a balance of identifying those tasks in your workflow that do show a performance improvement, while keeping in mind where you'd like to see improvement in your next upgrade down the line, can help alleviate this disappointment.

And also, regarding running other tasks simultaneously ... surely that only matters if you are reaching the limit of RAM / GPU / CPU?

It's general best practice to tax a system as little as possible, both for speed and stability, even with powerful systems. The packaging of modern hardware and software is so sleek it's easy to forget how complex they can be under the hood. This can be more critical for tasks like rendering out a deliverable, a lengthy continuous timeline in particular, where if the render fails you may have to start all over at the beginning if an error occurs. This approach has the added benefit of helping you identify any bottlenecks or issues you might experience with your setup much quicker and with more accuracy.

Even at 150GB RAM, I still have room to spare. Haven't yet checked percentage GPU / CPU usage whilst in resolve, but I would imagine that other programmes are using minimal resources when dormant (because editing in DR), and so this only comes into play when rendering.

Even when the traffic flow is less than a freeway is designed to handle, all it takes is one slow car in the passing lane to initiate a chain of events that can affect the efficiency of a long stretch of roadway for an extended period of time. This could be a slow or intermittent connection to a mail server, an application memory leak, or an aggressive background process. And modern systems are designed to throttle performance before the limits of the system are reached, like traffic control systems. And, like traffic control systems, that sometimes works well, and in other situations, not so much.

There will always be some traffic when the computer is on, even when you're not using it, but the less traffic you can put on the roadway, the more efficient the system will be overall.

Thank you for the thread Arlo, et al. I'm thinking about making the jump to Apple silicon in my workflow and have found the discussion here very helpful. I hope my responses, although general, contribute something useful.

If you want to see RAM usage, that's clearly displayed in Apple's Activity Monitor (second tab).

RAM is not only much faster than SSD, it'll also survive many more R/W-cycles than an SSD. And since Apple is soldering the SSDs onto the board, they'll be pricey to get repaired. So, keep those machines off swapping levels.
This is our heavy testing: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/c79wzx87 ... awtst&dl=0
(Use DeepL for translation)