Blackmagic Forum

Hendrik Proosa wrote:

Rajiv Mudgal wrote:On the other side, the vfx side of the post production its wait and watch..

I also use fusion, boris fx, mocha pro, octane/blender and am not seeing the same performance, but that may change soon.
Jules Urbach of OTOY (Octane render) has announced that an M1 version of Octane is in development and that is it "FAST!", so far so good.

And that 16 core neural engine is currently under utilized, so let's see.

I doubt it will make a dent in vfx, because power efficiency isn't an objective there. Efficiency is ofcourse good, more efficient at same compute power is better, but less compute for less power drain isn't a selling point. The laws of rendering are on the side of "do whatever it takes to make it go faster". Future might be ARM or some other RISC based processor family, but it most probably isn't by Apple, because Apple does not operate in a lot of areas and I think has no interest in doing that either.

It all kind of reminds me the quote by Master Zap from MentalRay who said that "ofcourse Renderman is fast, until you actually trace a ray". Ironically Mental Delay is now pretty much dead and Renderman traces rays like there is no tomorrow. Not sure if Apple is the Mental Ray here, or Renderman. But Renderman isn't sitting on its throne very comfortably, after Arnold kicked the door open with raw energy. And they are both looking over their shoulder where near-realtime gpu rasterization and raytracing are slamming left and right. But again, laws of rendering tell that near-realtime solutions will not kill off everything else.

I have a similar feeling about VFX, but imagine using 25 macmini running in slave mode and running it using home power outlet using just a 1 ton ac to cool it, its still cheaper than what I pay to external render farm. But there is a big BUT.

Rajiv Mudgal wrote:I have a similar feeling about VFX, but imagine using 25 macmini running in slave mode and running it using home power outlet using just a 1 ton ac to cool it, its still cheaper than what I pay to external render farm. But there is a big BUT.

People would run their iPhones in parallel right now if it were feasible. Reality is that building a system like this isn't doable for most and for those who can do it, I doubt they will build a renderfarm out of Mac minis. External render farms are actually a good comparison, one can run a renderfarm directly in AWS or Google Cloud or Azure 3-5x cheaper than commercial farms (I run my blender stuff on AWS) but most people still don't do it. Cheaper in cloud solutions is a very volatile term these days anyway, real disruption comes from there, not from a shiny box that can play video.

iPhones in parallel is a joke ofcourse Mac minis would make way better farm But I make my bets on running a zero client connected to workstation in cloud that can scale near-infinite at wish.

Hendrik Proosa wrote:
one can run a renderfarm directly in AWS or Google Cloud or Azure 3-5x cheaper than commercial farms (I run my blender stuff on AWS) but most people still don't do it. Cheaper in cloud solutions is a very volatile term these days anyway, real disruption comes from there, not from a shiny box that can play video.

Never done that, sounds interesting.
By the way otoy promises to do just that utilize all current generation iPhone and iPad along with m1 system's running in parallel.

Rajiv Mudgal wrote:Thats interesting benchmark sheet and strangely the realism of actual performance contradicts it, so it doesn't make sense, may be that's the nature of RISC processors and further how SOC affect the actual post production performance over and above benchmarks... Waiting to test octane.

Is your experience with the M1 done at full resolution? If the Resolve Performance Mode is activated (it's on by default) it can among other things reduce the decoding resolution when needed in order to maintain performance, depending on the features of the source codec. ProRes and CineForm has this ability (as do various raw codecs). "Real" performance of Resolve is easiest to test with a proper render. Hitting play in the NLE is not a good test as there are many different variables.

Is your experience with the M1 done at full resolution? If the Resolve Performance Mode is activated (it's on by default) it can among other things reduce the decoding resolution when needed in order to maintain performance, depending on the features of the source codec. ProRes and CineForm has this ability (as do various raw codecs). "Real" performance of Resolve is easiest to test with a proper render. Hitting play in the NLE is not a good test as there are many different variable

I have a feature film 2 hours long which won several national and international awards, will put it to test
Last time it took 8 hours to render at 4k. Just waiting for thunderbolt to pci adapter to arrive.
If the macmini can pull through, it will be one hell of an achievement.

To which codec(s) do you plan to render?

Most of the reviews have focused on timeline playback performance and I have only seen comments on one review about export/render performance which was not good with either Final Cut or Resolve even using ProRes files. Has any one seen any more reviews of rendering some real length videos like 30 mins to 2 hours and see performance against a PC with GPU and lots of RAM. My Threadripper with 1080Ti can match most of the reviewers timeline performance of UHD which is all I have to edit and rendering is of course really fast even for my old TR1920. I do have an interest in the Mini rather than upgrading my 1080Ti as I am sure I could just use my current PC for the render anyway if I got better timeline playback for some file formats. Having watched and read a lot I am close to thinking that for me a new GPU, RTX 3080 or RTX3090 may be better.

rick.lang wrote:To which codec(s) do you plan to render?

ProRes444

Would be also interesting to compare that 12 bit ProRes render time to 10 bit ProRes 422.

SkierEvans wrote:. Having watched and read a lot I am close to thinking that for me a new GPU, RTX 3080 or RTX3090 may be better.

8 years back we were on Linux for vfx, Mac for editing.
5 years back we moved and still are all windows.
And now I would prefer to edit on mac and use windows for vfx.
Keep in mind that workload in covid times is low, I will happily have my power bills cut down and the macmini will pay for itself and wait and watch whether nvidia and Intel get their act together and start supporting the new Sony, Panasonic, and Canons. In their next iteration.

Keep inmind, I lost one m6000 which cost 7 times more than macmini which is outperforming it on all fronts, so the choice for me was easy, if your system works for you, don't even bother buying, save your money, these are tough times.

Its still a non-creative market Mac Mini and sub tier Laptop.
Surprise, the the lower end is getting better.

I'd rather BMD focus more on bug fixes and better editorial features than recompile for a product line not intended for workstation level work.

Max Yuryev concludes at the end of this video that the M1, compared to an Intel - the M1 8GB RAM behaves like an Intel 16GB, and that the M1 16GB behaves like a "32GB+ or more" Intel.

Do the MacBook Air M1 are sold out and after these videos are viewed this week, the ‘entry level’ MacBook M1 may be gone in November.

We are so used to Apple product hype from Apple and the media that we can be forgiven for being skeptical during the Apple Event that introduced us to the M1. Sure the first M1 machines aren’t workstations. But I can see the wait won’t be long and it’s going to be a very interesting journey to the end of 2022.

The M1 has several specialized processor functions on the same die as the memory. Who’s to say there aren’t more being added to a future Mx SoC? Who’s to say more hardware functions like decoding and encoding other strategic still and video codecs aren’t coming? Specialized hardware VFX? I don’t know when the next shrink to 4nm or 3nm will be available from Apple, but you can add a lot more logic with less heat generated at a faster clock and the M2FX is ‘born to be wild.’

Do anyone know of 8gb vs 16gb macbook pro BRAW -> render test?

I'm kinda sold, already, by the Red code test where the 16gb macbook pro is about 2.3x times faster than the 8gb version.

Kinda think there are folks reading your message who have an answer but they may be under NDA.

M1 does better than Dell XPS 9500 content creator laptop - the latter being rather low-spec, 16GB RAM, 4GB VRAM.

Oyvind Fiksdal wrote:Do anyone know of 8gb vs 16gb macbook pro BRAW -> render test?

I'm kinda sold, already, by the Red code test where the 16gb macbook pro is about 2.3x times faster than the 8gb version.

Yeah the Red Code test is definitely one of the more exciting benchmarks I've seen promoting the 16GB M1 Macs.

I picked up the 8GB M1 Mac Mini and have been testing it with a 4K timeline, 5:1 BRAW and a rather heavy grade which utilises a Magic Mask node. I'm currently comparing performance of the Mini with my 2019 15" MacBook Pro:

2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
1TB PCIe-based SSD
Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB

Some key observations:

1) M1 handles heavy load much better, ie when Resolve is caching, rendering etc, regardless of how stressed the CPU or GPU is, the entire system never locks up completely. I could swipe across to Safari or any other application and it's smooth. On my MBP, once Resolve is under stress, the entire OS locks up and it crippled

2) General performance between both machines is, well, pretty much the same. Honestly, they both lack significant GPU horsepower and the MBP is at the mercy of its limited thermal overhead. Both machines particularly suffer when utilising the Magic Mask (but no surprise there) Again though, the M1 seems to handle stress better overall and I'm convinced that it's due to the SoC design which is proving more efficient despite only having 8GB of ram

3) Is 8gb enough on the Mac mini though? - for editing, sure. Colouring? No way. I've attached a screenshot of my memory usage from Activity Monitor. I'm constantly running out of memory and always observing 40+ GB being swapped to the 512GB SSD which quickly prompts MacOS to inform me that I'm out of application memory and to close something down - of course, Resolve is the first to go.

I've ordered the 16GB model with 1TB SSD but delivery is still 2-3 weeks away. With performance from the 8GB M1 Mac Mini being at least on par with my MBP, I think the cost vs value of M1 is promising but we'll see just how well the 16GB model holds up when it arrives.

Very keen to see where Apple Silicon goes with the Mac Pro.

First video shocasing issues, dont have any at my end....yet. Keeping the fingers crossed

Jerry seems to be very fair in his assessment. Rebooting fixed his issues. Good to know, teething problems may occur.

Next up, the 12 core M1X .... shall be an interesting few years ahead.

brediknight wrote:Its still a non-creative market Mac Mini and sub tier Laptop.
Surprise, the the lower end is getting better.

I'd rather BMD focus more on bug fixes and better editorial features than recompile for a product line not intended for workstation level work.

You couldn't be more wrong.
That's like saying they shouldn't waste resources on development for the 4k and 6k cameras.
There are a ton of creatives who are buying the M1, that could prospective resolve users.

I think a lot of the comparisons re intel vs M1 are looking at this the wrong way. It's in the growing mobile workstation category where the real battlefield is brewing. It will be a while, is my guess, before M1, even M1X can match the power of a fully armed Intel/Nvidia desktop but it may be a lot sooner to surpass the same laptops. If Intel want to fight back they have to break the core barrier on mobile cpus. Take for example my laptop a HP ZBook 17 G5, in every way hugely more powerful than the one it replaced: 4 x ram - 16gbb to 64GB (Soon to be 128gb), 8 x GPU vram - 2GB Geforce to 16GB Quadro. Only with the cpu is the difference smaller quadcore i7 to 6 core i7. Don't get me wrong, I have to work on a laptop and it flies in both Avid and DR for what I need, but it's cpu is no way a match for high end desktops. If there were 12, 16 core mobile cpus on offer from Intel/AMD then there would be a real fight. This all being said of course without real world knowledge of the true possibilities of M1X equipped MacBook Pros. Intel really need to be doing something there first urgently IMO.

I would still like to see performance related to different formats and specifically then exporting to different formats for a reasonable time length like 30 mins. I have no interesting in the performance for a 30 sec file.

Seconded. And I'd like to see Fusion performance on the 16 GB version.

Video showing Blender running on M1:

Nice video but still a very short time. No time for the system to get to over heat and start to shut down. I think these M1 Mac's look really great but for me shooting GH5 V log UHD 60P ( both from camera as h264 150Mbps and ProRes 4:2:2 from the Ninja V ) for long events ( if that ever happens again ! ) I want to preview at 60P and I need to encode a 2 hour file. With my present Threadripper with 1080Ti it will encode to h265 in about 1/2 realtime and do this for over a 2 hour program no problems. It will do a 3 track multicam of these files also with little issue. So my main interest in the M1's is really a technology interest. As a travel machine etc they look great but I do not see them replacing a workstation for a number of reasons.

Great to see the reality distortion field is still alive and kicking through statements like "Mind Blowing" and "Amazing" . I'm surprised nobody is talking about the fact that there are no user serviceable parts.

Once that Soldered on SSD dies... that's a very expensive repair bill, especially if it's going to be constantly paging content with the abysmally low RAM. One would hope they've soldered on parts that have decent write cycles.

I haven't seen anything to show if the new Macs can still boot up using external media for MacOS.

Fluke-000 wrote:

Oyvind Fiksdal wrote:Do anyone know of 8gb vs 16gb macbook pro BRAW -> render test?

I'm kinda sold, already, by the Red code test where the 16gb macbook pro is about 2.3x times faster than the 8gb version.

Yeah the Red Code test is definitely one of the more exciting benchmarks I've seen promoting the 16GB M1 Macs.

I picked up the 8GB M1 Mac Mini and have been testing it with a 4K timeline, 5:1 BRAW and a rather heavy grade which utilises a Magic Mask node. I'm currently comparing performance of the Mini with my 2019 15" MacBook Pro:

2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
1TB PCIe-based SSD
Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB

Some key observations:

1) M1 handles heavy load much better, ie when Resolve is caching, rendering etc, regardless of how stressed the CPU or GPU is, the entire system never locks up completely. I could swipe across to Safari or any other application and it's smooth. On my MBP, once Resolve is under stress, the entire OS locks up and it crippled

2) General performance between both machines is, well, pretty much the same. Honestly, they both lack significant GPU horsepower and the MBP is at the mercy of its limited thermal overhead. Both machines particularly suffer when utilising the Magic Mask (but no surprise there) Again though, the M1 seems to handle stress better overall and I'm convinced that it's due to the SoC design which is proving more efficient despite only having 8GB of ram

3) Is 8gb enough on the Mac mini though? - for editing, sure. Colouring? No way. I've attached a screenshot of my memory usage from Activity Monitor. I'm constantly running out of memory and always observing 40+ GB being swapped to the 512GB SSD which quickly prompts MacOS to inform me that I'm out of application memory and to close something down - of course, Resolve is the first to go.

I've ordered the 16GB model with 1TB SSD but delivery is still 2-3 weeks away. With performance from the 8GB M1 Mac Mini being at least on par with my MBP, I think the cost vs value of M1 is promising but we'll see just how well the 16GB model holds up when it arrives.

Very keen to see where Apple Silicon goes with the Mac Pro.

Thank you for great information.

You are talking about coloring, how many nodes and what kind of coloring do you refer to in this case. I for one normally end up with power grade including +10 nodes. Sometimes including Fx like glow and sometimes noise reduction. I can’t see the M1 coop with that.. but I might be wrong.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect it to, I’m looking at the MacBook Pro M1 as a light editing equipment for traveling.

Steve Fishwick wrote:I think a lot of the comparisons re intel vs M1 are looking at this the wrong way. It's in the growing mobile workstation category where the real battlefield is brewing. It will be a while, is my guess, before M1, even M1X can match the power of a fully armed Intel/Nvidia desktop but it may be a lot sooner to surpass the same laptops.

Spot on...We have seen how the giants of computing world, Silicon Graphics, Solaris. to name the few bit the dust when they couldn’t handle the pressure from below, The sign is all over the wall with NVIDIA acquiring Arm Limited and Microsoft ditching intel by partnering with AMD and Qualcomm, to design their new upcoming processor for future Surface machines.

SkierEvans wrote: As a travel machine etc they look great but I do not see them replacing a workstation for a number of reasons.

They are desktop class mobile device, thats how I see it.

The bigger problem I am facing is how do I interface it with my storage because these will be very costly to replace.
So integration is a serious issue and I don’t see them replacing even the 12 years old Macpros that are still used.
So they certainly cannot replace workstations but their claim to mobile editing desktops on wheels would be hard to refute today.

I wont be surprised when the News industry completely replace all their edit desktops with M1Z Macs and replace their ageing cameras with the new 8K 10bit h265 offering from Canon, Panasonic and Sony. The market potential is phenomenal, and once they shift, the rest of us will follow them like a herd of sheep.

Rajiv Mudgal wrote:

SkierEvans wrote: As a travel machine etc they look great but I do not see them replacing a workstation for a number of reasons.

They are desktop class mobile device, thats how I see it.

To me the biggest benefit here, at least for now, may be for the young mobile editor & "digital nomads". You could grab a 13" M1 laptop and Speed Editor and boom you can edit on set or on the bus/plane on your lap and throw your whole rig in a briefcase. And the battery life... All for under $1000 USD !! woohoo

Yogendra Singh wrote:

Uli Plank wrote:No, the fastest is in the mini and the MBP. Air is mildly throttled.

It is very impressive. I am waiting to see the results on how fast DVR neural engine features are? Buying a mac mini may be much cheaper than upgrading my current system.
I am currently using 8 USB ports all the time. It can be difficult to handle all things with only 2 USB ports. Also attaching 2 monitors will be a problem with the mac mini.

With the two ports Thunderbolt 4, you should be able to use a Thunderbolt hub to provide you more ports for your needs.

Just opened a 1 hour long complex 4K Documentary timeline populated with 6K 10 bit H265 clips with Fusion titles, grades, tracking etc. etc. and it played to the end as if it was a 720P proxy.
So that was a pleasant surprise.
Mac mini M1 16gb version - Resolve 17.1 Beta3
There are lot of missing clips as they are on the other server still...Its indeed mind Blowing.

brediknight wrote:I'd rather BMD focus more on bug fixes and better editorial features than recompile for a product line not intended for workstation level work.

Next year we will see workstation-level M1 (M1x, M2?) machines. Apple said they'd move their entire lineup to Apple Silicon within two years.

Having an M1-based product doesn't require a lot of recoding, mostly just recompiling. In cases where they might've been using older APIs or were taking advantage of non-documented calls, etc, they'll have to recode and that's good -- i.e. eliminates potential bugs -- even on non-M1 machines. So it's not an either/or situation where they're ignoring bugs or refusing to improve something because they'd rather run on an M1.

And the M1 is amazing. It'll allow editing on a machine that's on battery power, or in a desktop (with plenty of cooling) they'll be able to scale things up for amazing power. And the neural engine part will hopefully fit BMD's Neural Engine code very well.

Also note that if you have a Studio license you can now use that on Fusion Studio (17 beta). Standalone Fusion is spec'd to run in 16 GB, I believe, so it should be a more solid performer on the 16GB M1 Mini than Fusion in Resolve.

Also, while the M1 is oriented towards low power, I think Apple will come out with X versions -- as they do with their A chips -- that are more performance-oriented. (Currently, if the iPhone has an A12 chip, Apple then comes out with a more powerful A12X chip for iPad Pros.)

So an M1X or M2X could be a desktop monster. There are other limits to clock speed than purely thermal issues, but a more-efficient chip can in general be clocked at a higher speed for the same power input and cooling capability. The initial release emphasizes battery life and no-fan designs and other low-power strengths, but there is probably a lot of room to crank up the clock rates or cram in more cores/CPUs and still fit into a reasonable cooling/power profile.

I’m using Resolve 17 public beta 6, Mac mini M1 with 8 GB of RAM and the disc has about 60 GB available after various applications have been installed. The media drive is a Samsung T5 solid-state.
I wanted 16 GB but that unit has not been available. I’m going to return this one within the exchange period and upgrade to the 16 even though many tests show that it makes little difference. My experience with the M1 and Davinci is with 4K Braw in a 1080 timeline and it has been an entirely different experience so far compared to the amazing demonstrations people are showing online. I even tried using optimized ProRes media and it made little difference. Main problem has been during rendering and export. With about 10 nodes including Glow and Film Convert (I didn’t dare use NR yet). What happens is Davinci slowly starts to use more and more memory as indicated with the activity monitor. Eventually when it gets to around 40 or even up to 50 GB, a window comes up about running out of memory. This even happened
Sometimes when rendering the timeline without trying to export. But yea I could not even export an 18 minute project, had to force quit Davinci! Is this some kind of massive memory leak? I tried multiple things in hopes of solving this problem and nothing helped until several settings were adjusted as follows: in the delivery page I dropped the render speed down to 75 and I turned off “updates during renders” in the render queue. Not sure which one made the difference but I finally could export a 1080P project. Can’t remember for sure but I think it was rendering out at about eight frames a second. Also of note, when I simply try to play back the timeline without the clips having been rendered, Color grading on, Timeline proxy turned off, it said it was playing back at 30 FPS (which is what my project is) but it was anything but 30, more like seven frames a second. When I set the timeline proxy to Half resolution, again it said it was playing back at 30 frames a second but only Sometimes did it look perfectly smooth as it would stutter a lot. The playback frames per second indicator seems inconsistent and very buggy, sometimes it did drop down to indicate more realistic measure. The 10 node grade included about three windows (without tracking) Glow and film convert. Only when I dropped timeline proxy to 1/4 resolution did it play consistently smooth at 30 frames per second. I can only imagine having a 4K timeline would make all this much worse. Of course there are easy workarounds for editing and for color grading just letting the clips render out for smooth playback would be very helpful. I hope that version 17 gets better and more optimized for the M1 to solve such problems as I’ve been having. And maybe I have overlooked some settings etc. that are causing these difficulties? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I don't know if that was a typo, but you need to use a 17.1 beta, not 17. Only 17.1 is optimized for the Apple M1 chip.

Thanks for check in about 17 or 17.1, yes I made sure to check that it was optimized for the M1 and indeed everything I said was regarding 17.1, public beta 6.