From PC to Mac M1, GoPro 1080p and 4K

Hi all,

New to this forum and after some advice...

Currently have a PC which has given up its ghost; 1st gen i7, 24GB ram, 1GB graphics card. It was great back in 2009 running Adobe Premiere Pro, but was simply slowing down and finally stopped. A 1 hour 1080p timeline, with no colour correction or effects would take well over 3 hours to export, if it didn't crash...

Have read many good things about Davinci Resolve (DR) and will make the switch with my new setup. From a hardware perspective, I'm contemplating getting a Mac Mini M1 with 16GB ram and 1TB ssd, will mainly be editing 1080p GoPro footage with 4K GoPro footage in the future. I have done much research and have observed mostly positive reviews with the Mac M1 and DR.

What has been your real world experience with the Mac M1 running DR? Will it easily handle 4K GoPro footage (H.264)? What could I expect in terms of export time for a 1 hour 1080p timeline?

Or should I go PC or wait for the M1X?

Open to advice.

Cheers

It all depends what you want to do with your footage beyond editing and some simple grading.
The current M1 machines are entry-level models. Their strength is hardware decoding for nearly every GOP codec out there, so they'll play 4K H.264 or 265 smoothly.
Their limitation is limited GPU power. I wouldn't recommend a current M1 as your only machine on the long run. You may need processes like NR, which will bog these down, at least in 4K.
My wife has the MB Air M1 and is very happy with it, but she's a graphics designer and doesn't need heavy video lifting. Myself, I'm patiently waiting for the MX1 (or whatever they'll call it) for my next laptop, but I have my other machines.
If you need something now, like NOW, and only need HD for a year or, I'd suggest the Mac mini M1 with 8 GB RAM, you won't need to invest a lot.

I would recommend any good PC as an alternative, but strong GPUs are so expensive right now.

Great, thank you for the feedback.

I have just ordered a M1 MacBook Pro for my wife with 16GB Ram. I will see how this performs with the GoPro footage, Davinci Resolve 17 and export times. If this works out, it will give me some time to wait for the M1X, if not, i'll reconsider the PC route...

If anyone is interested, happy to post an update once my testing is done. Just let me know...

Yes, please!

NJS007 - I would echo Uli's comments. I bought the M1 Mac mini with 8Gb of RAM as a "use it now" option.

At present I usually edit HD, I have found that using effects/titles and performing some basic grading works well. I have been surprised how well the system copes with H.264, 265. I am very happy with the system.

Edit: FYI limit the size of the internal storage, add an external SSD or NVME drive, they are nearly as fast as the internal storage and the external option is a lot less $$$ than Apple want for the same amount of space.
Resolve has no issue using an external storage drive.

Like everyone, I'm also waiting for the next M series release.

Second that.
Apple's internal storage is highly overpriced and H.264/265 in particular is not critical in data throughput.

Alright, so the M1 16GB MacBook Pro has arrived and I have done some render exports in Davinci Resolve (DR) 17.2.2 (free version)... Initial impressions are wow, DR loads extremely quick and so does the project file.

The footage was family footage, approx. 1.5 hours of GoPro 1080P filmed at 25fps, H.264 codec and .MP4 video format. I added a very basic title at the start and continuous titles throughout the video to show the date. No Fusion effects like Noise Reduction etc.

For the render/export, I essentially matched the source footage (25 fps, 1080P resolution, H.264 codec and .MP4 format). I also set the quality to 25000kb/s and selected the encoding profile to 'high'. Key frames I left as 'Automatic'.

Now, this same project to export in my previous set-up would have taken me approx. 3-4 hours (if my PC didn't crash). With the M1 MB Pro, it took only 14m:32s. Wow! I couldn't believe how quick this set-up is. Extremely impressed, both with DR and also with the M1 MB Pro. The rendered video is exceptional in quality and the file size is approx. 60% of the file size of the individual videos it consists of.

I have yet to try 4K footage but from what i understand, the new Apple M1 chips have specific H.264/H.265 encoding/decoding engines built-in and it shows. I was a bit skeptical about the rave of this M1 chip, especially on Social Media, but having done this actual test, it is seriously impressive.

Cheers.

So basically you only tested hardware H264 decode and encode performance and nothing else. Try temporal denoise or any real load and it'll crawl to stop.

"Try temporal denoise" on the free version ?

I bought a mini mac m1 16gb, 512gb ssd - I think it does well in terms of what it costs !

Second that. Serious temporal effects like NR, Optical Flow or some filters will challenge it seriously due to the very limited GPU performance.
OTOH, a few basic grades are OK.