Recent Mac Studio likes/dislikes?

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Kevin Monahan

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Recent Mac Studio likes/dislikes?

PostThu Jun 30, 2022 11:57 pm

I'd like to replace my 2017 iMac with a Mac Studio. I know the MS will be much faster but I've not found a lot of more recent info on people's experiences--like June 2022 or later. Most search results are back in April, when folks hadn't had a lot of time on the hardware. I've watched/read lots of reviews of the hardware but want real world experiences.

So, any particular joys/disappointments you've had with a Studio? I primarily use BRAW footage (up to 7 tracks, 4K, 4.6K, 6K) and a varying amount of Color and Fusion effects. Yeah, pretty loose requirements but...

1) How many BRAW tracks before you can't get 30fps playback without proxies? Obviously dependent on the amount of color/fusion nodes, etc--again, looking for gut-feel experiences.
2) Rendering BRAW to MP4/H.265--good improvements here?
3) Places where Fusion doesn't seem to exploit the hardware's capabilities?
4) Importance you place on Max vs Ultra, 48 vs 64 GPU cores, 64 vs 128 GB?

My video is mostly on external T3 RAID 0 drive configs but I'd probably spend the money to max out the SSD (yeah, expensive but I *try* to not upgrade frequently.) Do you feel that Resolve is CPU/GPU constrained or disk read constrained (assuming good/great read speeds?)

Things I hope to improve when I upgrade: 1) much faster rendering for delivery, 2) smoother playback in the edit tab, 3) faster updating when Fusion tab changes are made.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Kevin
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2023 Mac Studio Ultra, 192GB RAM, 60-core GPU option
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Uli Plank

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Re: Recent Mac Studio likes/dislikes?

PostFri Jul 01, 2022 8:41 am

I can't speak for the Mac Studio, but it's not that different from other M1 machines.

A few comments from my point of view:
– Wasting money on internal storage is not needed, not even for ArriRAW, but even less so for BRAW.
- I get very good speed from an Acasis with a NVMe SSD via Thunderbolt. Plays ArriRAW smoothly.
- Resolve and its rendering speeds will be surprising for you.
– Fusion, OTOH, will not be that impressive, any desktop PC with a really strong CPU and lots of RAM will still be better.
– Exporting into H.265 at excellent quality in 10 bit 4:2:2 will fly.
No, an iGPU is not enough, and you can't use HEVC 10 bit 4:2:2 in the free version.

Studio 18.6.5, MacOS 13.6.5
MacBook M1 Pro, 16 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM and iPhone 15 Pro
Speed Editor, UltraStudio Monitor 3G, iMac 2017, eGPU
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Rick van den Berg

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Re: Recent Mac Studio likes/dislikes?

PostFri Jul 01, 2022 10:06 am

I switched my main editing workstation from windows (AMD 3900X, 2 GTX 1080's) to a mac studio ultra 128GB a month or 2 ago. We've got some intel-based imacs in the office as well so i think i have some everyday experience with different systems. They are all hooked up with a 10Gb connection to a qnap server.

I enjoy working with it so far. It's a nice step forward. But i'm not "blown away" or something. I mostly work with 4k 50 frames XAVC and R3D files, some arri lately as well. In my experience resolve runs really smooth on the parts which already ran smooth (color page, edit page), but fusion is generally still a bit sluggish/leaking memory, no real noticeable difference there. Coming from windows, i didn't really miss that spinning beachball.

Other jobs like rendering cinema4d/blender/houdini is generally a step forward. I still need to try unreal RTX stuff, but i heard that was pretty good as well.

and it looks pretty slick on my desk :)
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Kevin Monahan

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Re: Recent Mac Studio likes/dislikes?

PostFri Jul 01, 2022 11:06 pm

Rick van den Berg wrote:...fusion is generally still a bit sluggish/leaking memory, no real noticeable difference there.


Knowing BMD's reputation I'm sure there will be Fusion improvements in the future. Be interesting to understand more why fusion is lagging behind on the "performance improvement" front. Problems parallelizing complex fusion nodes for multiple CPU cores, algorithms are not suitable for GPUs (again, parallelizing), aging code that doesn't really exploit the multithreading/GPU features of macOS?

And thanks to you (and you also, Uli) for your thoughts. Wee bit scary to spend "MacStudio-level" $$$ and I want to get it right; I keep stuff for the longer haul.
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Peter Cave

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Re: Recent Mac Studio likes/dislikes?

PostSun Jul 03, 2022 1:19 am

I don't use RAW video very often but everything I have used on a base model Mac Studio has run very smoothly. It is about 3 times more responsive than my old Hackintosh that had an AMD RX580 8GB GPU.
Resolve 18.6.5 Mac OSX 14.4 Sonoma
Mac Studio Max 32GB

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