PC or Mac computer for using Davinci Resolve

Hi there, I am looking at what would be a good new computer to use for editing my DJI pocket 3, Panasonic G80 and footage from my phone. I need smooth playback in real time at 4k, with transitions, a little fusion and colour grade. I will be delivering out in 4k for YouTube.

On the PC side I have been looking at Lenovo which seems a good price here right now. I am currently in China so self build is going to be a little harder for me I think.

For the Lenovo PC: Rescuer Blade 7000K Super Edition i9 RTX4070TiS Desktop
14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900HX/Windows 11 Home Chinese Version/RTX4070 Ti SUPER 16G/32G(16*2)/1T SSD https://item.lenovo.com.cn/product/1037096.html?typeId=3d820ac4-c86c-4c3c-b260-fbc153275957&page=7&sorter=4

On the Mac side: Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 48GB unified memory and 512GB SSD storage.

Both systems are around the same price, so would like to know which one would be worth buying or is there something better for around £1626 price range?

Mobile? Mac
Desktop? PC
I think you answer your own question. Both are capable enough.
But I don't get that point about the VRAM. Is it 16 or 32?

But I don't get that point about the VRAM. Is it 16 or 32?

Sorry about that, I copied it directly from Lenovo and looking again you are right it's not very clear. It's 16 vram and 2x16 system ram. Both Mac and PC are for the desk top although both of the CPU chips are in laptops also.

.. I need smooth playback in real time at 4k, with transitions, a little fusion and colour grade. I will be delivering out in 4k for YouTube

Easy, use a video editing codec. ProRes or DNxHD/HR. Even a 4th generation intel CPU will handle that with no issues.

Easy, use a video editing codec. ProRes or DNxHD/HR. Even a 4th generation intel CPU will handle that with no issues.

Yes that's good advice, but I am hopeful that I can just edit my footage loaded straight from my cameras without having to transcode or anything .

With any Mx Mac you are on the safe side regarding decoding in hardware, and it'll work right out of the box.

But the iGPU in that PC's Intel CPU should also handle your sources. Configuration may be a bit more tricky, you may need to search for the right GPU driver and get rid of all the crap manufacturers install to please gamers. The positive side of the PC is upgradability, like a stronger GPU or more RAM if needed.

On the Mac side, are you thinking of a Mac mini or a laptop? I'd advise a laptop only if you need it, or you'll have to pay for the screen, the battery, and the keyboard. And then, touchpads are not ideal for DR, you will want to get a mouse. If you already have a monitor etc., you can save quite a bit with a desktop. The configuration you described will suffice in a Mac mini. If you want a serious workstation, I'd try to get a good price for the Mac Studio M2 or wait for the M4 in spring.

Finally, there is no computer for any price that will do all demanding effects in DR in realtime. But there are enough workarounds. Oh, and phone footage can be problematic on either machine, which one is it?

Thanks Uli Plank. I was looking at the Mac mini version and if that's not good enough possible wait for the M4 studio if it's not too much more in price. Yes laptops are much more expensive and currently I won't be taking my computer out and about plus I also do have a monitor.

I am a PC person, even though I have used other people's Macs in the past I have never owned one myself so I am also happy to go the PC route if it's going to be as good or better in performance. My current phone is a Xiaomi Mi T10 Pro which I don't use all the time but do still have some old footage I need to get around to editing but most of my footage will be from my pocket 3 for the time being.

Even the base model of the Mac mini can handle what you describe. Differences will lie in the speed of render for complex tasks, like re-timing, NR, re-lighting and such. The machine you are looking at should handle all that without issues, more is only needed id you have to serve tight deadlines.
Of course, knowing Apple, any M4 Mac Studio will be more expensive.

Regarding your phone footage, if you can post a test sample to a cloud service, I can check if it has any issues. In our household there's only a Redmi 12 Pro, so I don't know how that compares.

Thanks Uli Plank, here's a link to some phone footage https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hdjqv6 ... drive_link

One thing I have difficulty with now is on screen text and transitions slowing the playback down, also once I start doing audio clean up in Fairlight things can start to get a bit sluggish too.

That clip is in variable frame rate, as typical for smartphones, but with very low variations. It doesn't show any issues on my humble M1 Pro laptop. The only problem you may encounter with really long takes could be some asynchronous audio, which can't be cured by more processing power.
I can add titles and transitions and play them smoothly in HD without any tricks. Which kind of titles or transitions are problematic on your current hardware?

That clip is in variable frame rate, as typical for smartphones, but with very low variations. It doesn't show any issues on my humble M1 Pro laptop. The only problem you may encounter with really long takes could be some asynchronous audio, which can't be cured by more processing power.
I can add titles and transitions and play them smoothly in HD without any tricks. Which kind of titles or transitions are problematic on your current hardware?

Most slow down the playback, it sort of slows down as it hits a Text or transition and then almost freezes and misses the effect before its is then in sync again on the next clip.

So it looks like even a cheaper Mac mini might be ok?

I would say so. If you can compose a short project with things that typically slow you down, make an archive and zip that, I can give it a try too, and film playback with a camera (not to add load by screen recording).

Most slow down the playback, it sort of slows down as it hits a Text or transition and then almost freezes and misses the effect before its is then in sync again on the next clip.

So it looks like even a cheaper Mac mini might be ok?

I think this is kind of unavoidable, I tested those basic effects on an M1 Max 64GB and it would still struggle - but Resolve usually automatically cache those bits during the first playback so if you go back and try again they'll be smooth.

My Windows PC does the same. I'd imagine you'd need something very powerful - and use Editing Friendly codecs - to avoid that.

The M1 Max felt like I was using Proxies on my Windows PC

I'll probably get a Mac Mini as a "weekend workstation" - my timeline is nothing special but because of the "picture in picture" it has 3 streams simultaneously, I am curious to see how the Mac Mini base can handle that. But all the reviews and demoes I found online seem to be very enthusiastic about the performance - for the price. The moment you get more RAM or more Storage or a better CPU and then you can get a better performing PC for the money, but not with that footprint

Also, it seems that the ARM version of Resolve is particularly good, hence the very smooth editing experience regardless of the hardware behind it - render time will then depend on the CPU of your choice.

PS: I am not an Apple person but have to admit the recent M CPUs are honestly amazing.

I've heard good things about M-series Apple hardware. Anecdotally, Markiplier uses Resolve on a Mac Studio to edit Iron Lung, and he was shocked at how smooth the experience was compared to his high-end Windows workstation equipped with an RTX 4090, so that seems to be a strong vote of confidence in favor of Apple hardware.

I've had great results with my PC hardware. I'm just a regular guy trying to create and preserve family memories, not a famous Youtuber trying to make a Hollywood movie, of course. Over the past month or so I've been throwing three 4k30 streams (one HEVC, two AVC) at Resolve Studio and it's been running smooth as butter, but if I change so much as one setting on one camera the whole thing will basically grind to a halt. I am aware that my CPU, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, is not the optimal choice, but the RAM (64GB DDR5-6000), GPU (RTX 4090), and storage (a mix of PCIe 4.0 NVMe disks and an external SAS array of 8 SSDs) are sufficient. The main problem is 4:2:2 chroma subsampling regardless of video format, so I need to make sure they're 4:2:0 or 4:4:4 before I start working with them or I'm in for ridiculous render times. Not sure why 4:2:2 is so common when Intel's really the only one supporting it, but that's probably a question for another forum entirely Also, I'm running a Linux distribution that Blackmagic Design does not support, which places some limits on codec support (codec licensing restrictions, not on BMD), so there are self-inflicted caveats surrounding that as well.

...but that's the kind of stuff you'll need to think of when trying to decide between hardware platforms. Source material, whether you want to work with proxy media (has transcoding time/disk usage overhead), how long you want to wait for the final product to render, and so on.

I got my M1 Studio Max when they came out in 2022. At the time I was looking to upgrade the GPU, a 1080Ti, in my PC for a 3090. Of course at that time there were no GPU's to buy other than in a prebuilt system. I had not got an Apple product in the past because I had always made my own PC's and like to upgrade. However the cost difference between a 3090, if I could have got one, and the M1 Studio Max was less than $200 and of course I would not take the 3090 apart to fix either !! I shoot shows with 3 cameras so multicam in DR and my PC was struggling a little with the GH5, GH5S and then the GH6 files all shooting Vlog at 60P. The M1 Studio Max will play multicam with source files no problem however I often move project to PC, now with 4070Ti for render as it is often faster if I have used noise reduction or more fusion effects or titles. I am sure a modern CPU in the PC would be even faster. I now like the combination of absolutely silent editing with the M1 Studio Max and faster rendering of more complex timelines with the PC if needed. You may well want to look for a used M2 Studio Max with more GPU cores than the mini's and cooler operation.

I would go with M4 Pro mini with as much RAM as you can afford in your budget.

Don't get fooled by all those youtubers with base models m4 mini with 16GB that can handle all, it can't. It is an amazing machine, it will handle it till a point where it start to swap memory, and here you go with slow downs and other problems... For you workflow go with as much RAM as you can afford or you will soon realize how 16GB or even 24GB are not enough.

In that budget range i would go with mac mini m4 pro with at least 48GB of RAM.

Be aware that at some point any mac or pc configuration will struggle and you will not get smooth playback at 4k, it depends of complexity, effects et.. used on your timeline, there is no configuration that can handle all at any budget.

I'm mostly MAC user (not a fanboy), so can't tell anything on recent windows side.

The M1 Studio Max will play multicam with source files no problem however I often move project to PC, now with 4070Ti for render as it is often faster if I have used noise reduction or more fusion effects or title.

Yes that is my understanding as well. The "pure rendering power" is easier to achieve on a PC with a good GPU but somehow Resolve is smoother on the Mac when editing.

Don't get fooled by all those youtubers with base models m4 mini with 16GB that can handle all, it can't. It is an amazing machine, it will handle it till a point where it start to swap memory, and here you go with slow downs and other problems

I am getting fooled, I will test soon.
I need a "weekend system" and for £599 I cannot get anything decent in the Windows world for video editing. My timeline is simple-ish: main video is 4K H264, I then have one or two extra clips as "picture in picture" - both are FHD H264.

No effects - besides transitions and the silly "border" effect which unfortunately is a Fusion effect and has a massive impact on the rendering times...

But yes, more is always better - but while the Mac Mini M4 base model is a "no brainer" when compared to a PC, more powerful models will get more and more less appealing because with the same money you start getting a pretty powerful PC.

The Mac alternative might be smoother when it comes to editing but the PC alternative will then get faster when rendering.

I need a "weekend system" and for £599 I cannot get anything decent in the Windows world for video editing. My timeline is simple-ish: main video is 4K H264, I then have one or two extra clips as "picture in picture" - both are FHD H264.

It's going to handle that, my laptop does and memory is not tight for something like that.
Fusion FX are always slow.

Editing is easier on the Mac because of hardware decode/encode with the full set of codec of h264 and h265 that are not complete on the PC GPU's for 10bit. You can do what you want I am sure on the base Mini M4. Get memory and then buy external drive for storage. The issue will come for more complex editing/rendering especially noise reduction or fusion when the PC will be clear winner. On my systems the iPad rendering some noise reduction and fusion title is about 1 fps, Studio Max with same project 3 or 4 fps and my PC 13 fps. A big difference that I think is all down to the GPU. 10 core GPU on iPad, 24 core on the Studio Max and then the 4070Ti which is not the most powerful PC GPU you can get.

The M1 Studio Max will play multicam with source files no problem however I often move project to PC, now with 4070Ti for render as it is often faster if I have used noise reduction or more fusion effects or title.

Yes that is my understanding as well. The "pure rendering power" is easier to achieve on a PC with a good GPU but somehow Resolve is smoother on the Mac when editing.

Don't get fooled by all those youtubers with base models m4 mini with 16GB that can handle all, it can't. It is an amazing machine, it will handle it till a point where it start to swap memory, and here you go with slow downs and other problems

I am getting fooled, I will test soon.
I need a "weekend system" and for £599 I cannot get anything decent in the Windows world for video editing. My timeline is simple-ish: main video is 4K H264, I then have one or two extra clips as "picture in picture" - both are FHD H264.

No effects - besides transitions and the silly "border" effect which unfortunately is a Fusion effect and has a massive impact on the rendering times...

But yes, more is always better - but while the Mac Mini M4 base model is a "no brainer" when compared to a PC, more powerful models will get more and more less appealing because with the same money you start getting a pretty powerful PC.

The Mac alternative might be smoother when it comes to editing but the PC alternative will then get faster when rendering.

You will be fine with that, base model is great machine, I got two base models just for running Nobe Omniscope and they are doing amazingly good.

Have tested them in davinci studio too. they are pretty powerful with simple timelines and grades even in 4K UHD timelines, as soon as you add some "heavy effects" it will struggle a bit. It all depends of timeline complexity, of your footage etc.. If you are doing simple works, go with base model, if you want better and smoother experience go with PRO models. Overall amazing little machines, but not for complex works IMHO. RAM and more RAM.

4-5 minutes of UHD footage (Canon R5, 422HQ, UHD 25fps, h265 main 422 10 L 5.2), some basic grading, few titles and basic transition and with 16GB of RAM and you will start to swap memory. Only one tab in Chrome opened in bacground and mail app.. Pressure goes high when playing and obviously when adding heavy or not so heavy effects, you don't have smooth or real time playback anymore, JFI.

Of course you can do basic editing and grading with it and it will perform very well, just saying for more serious works you need to go with more power and more ram.

ram.png (270.99 KiB) Viewed 4772 times

Thanks all for the feedback!

Rendering is not critical - and if I have to I can VPN into my home system, copy the project (or I might pay for the network one!) and have my home system render it!

The M1 Max I tested was a bit faster than my home system (in signature) in rendering. Considering it's a Laptop, it's impressive!

I would say so. If you can compose a short project with things that typically slow you down, make an archive and zip that, I can give it a try too, and film playback with a camera (not to add load by screen recording).

Here's the zip to a project that will struggle on my system
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WiE3OV ... drive_link

I haven't go a video yet of my system slowing down but I will do that tomorrow.

Both my Studio Max and PC play with just a little stutter on the last circles effect. Frame rate indicator drops to 26.5 on both from about half way through the effect.

I get exactly the same with my humble laptop, only the circles show minor stutter, or rather 'hesitating'. M4 is three generations ahead and will be close to twice as fast.
Memory use by DR is close to 13 GB. So, I'd suggest the base M4 Mac mini, but upgraded to 24 GB to have some overhead. If you insist on realtime, the Pro model will do for those circles, but I doubt it's worth the price. For creative work, one can always use cache, RiP, or reduced resolution to get the feel of it.
Rendering into H.265 Master (DR preset) takes 23 seconds.

Just did it on my M2 iPad and it stuttered in a few more places but not really that much of a problem for it.

Thank for the results on the test. My pc is rendering in around 2 minutes.

The iPad renders in 23 sec, PC in 20 sec and the Studio Max in 15 sec. For this the source and project were on a 2T SSD external just moved around between them with export back to the same SSD. Export was to h265.

I finally got the Lenovo PC: (Legen)Rescuer Blade 7000K Super Edition i9 RTX4070TiS Desktop
14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900HX/Windows 11 Pro/RTX4070 Ti SUPER 16G/ 32G(16*2) Ram/1T SSD https://item.lenovo.com.cn/product/1037 ... 7&sorter=4

Running the same test as before https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WiE3OV ... drive_link

I now get perfect playback

Also render times are as follows:

H265Master setting Encoder NVidia 16 seconds
H265Master setting Encoder Intel Quick Sync 34 seconds
H265Master setting Encoder Native 15 seconds

I need to go and try it out on a real project now.

On my M1 Max MacBook Pro 16 running Resolve Studio 19.1.2 with all caching disabled, it did the H265 Master export in 15 seconds the first time and 12 seconds for subsequent exports. So 15 seconds for a Windows laptop is good.

On my M1 Ultra Mac Studio running Resolve Studio 19.1.2 with all caching disabled, it did the H265 Master export in 10 seconds.

So 15 seconds for a Windows laptop is good.

On my M1 Ultra Mac Studio running Resolve Studio 19.1.2 with all caching disabled, it did the H265 Master export in 10 seconds.

Thank you for posting your results. Even though the i9-14900HX is normally a laptop chip my Lenovo PC is actually a desktop computer. I think it might be adjusted to push a little more processing power compared to the laptop version, although I didn't notice any fan noise when running my tests. What was the playback like on your timeline? I would be interested to know if that end graphics played back smoothly.

Thanks for the correction about your machine being a desktop, not laptop.

With all caching off and full res playback, both M1 Max MBP and M1 Ultra Mac Studio were 100% smooth at 1x playback speed. There was never the slightest stutter or dropped frame. However, immediately after loading the timeline, if I used the JKL keys to rapidly go 8x forward speed and immediately 8x reverse speed, it was a little laggy for about 2 sec, then it became persistently smooth even at high speed forward and reverse.

On my M1 Max MacBook Pro 16 running Resolve Studio 19.1.2 with all caching disabled, it did the H265 Master export in 15 seconds the first time and 12 seconds for subsequent exports. So 15 seconds for a Windows laptop is good.

On my M1 Ultra Mac Studio running Resolve Studio 19.1.2 with all caching disabled, it did the H265 Master export in 10 seconds.

If caching was truly disabled and cleared, it should have been the same each time. I expect you had some cache enabled that resulted in the second pass being faster. Yes I hope the Ultra is faster.

I tested this on a MBP 3 Max, 36G. Got stutters initially a few seconds in and at circles a bit. Second playback no stutters. Export to all defaults on 265Master gave a 133.8M file in 14 seconds. Second time was 12 seconds. I suspect MacOS does it's own caching. Also I suspect why Joema had no issues after scrubbing first. The cache is warmed up. Closing and reopening DRS confirmed this, didn't reboot.

FWIW, I've had smooth editing on Linux too, Windows was the most erratic though it's been about 18 months since I tested W.

My DRS cache is totally off but with all my projects even FHD multicam ones there's always some stutters first time round. Only commercial app I've used with no stutter on first run was Vegas but that was years ago and on lesser hw. Lastly I don't use DRS exports (in a trad sense) anyways, I export to image seq and then use a desktop pc to convert to AV1 as MBP is about 1/3 to 1/4 the speed of my desktop with AV1 Cpu encoding.

...If caching was truly disabled and cleared, it should have been the same each time. I expect you had some cache enabled that resulted in the second pass being faster. Yes I hope the Ultra is faster.

There is nothing in CacheClips. There are other levels of caching such as L1, L2 and L3 CPU cache, separate Translation Lookaside Buffer cache for the Address Translation Unit, filesystem cache, etc.

There are also background tasks which may detect foreground activity levels and go to a quiescent state. On Macs that could be Time Machine or Spotlight indexing. I thought I disabled Time Machine and Spotlight, but maybe I did not.

On Windows that could include Windows Search Indexing, Windows Defender, and the SysMain service. All of those have different "quiescence models" which will perturb benchmarking if not shut down.

We would also need a longer test to reduce run-to-run variation.

Yes I agree but if subsequent encodes are faster it is using a cache. Doesn't matter from where really. If on first play it stutters but subsequent ones play fine it has cached somewhere. I thought that if cache was not selected in advanced settings on delivery page it would not be used so the encode times should always be the same. I have deleted project now so can't run again.

as far as I know Resolve will cache those difficult transitions regardless of whether "render cache" is enabled or not.