Anyone Editing PP with MAC Mini M1?

[Bill Celnick]

I actually have one on order – should be here sometime late today – assuming no issues setting up and downloading all the apps, hopefully I’ll do some testing this week-end.

Most of my footage is 4K, cameras are Lumix S1, GH4, UX 90 and will be using a 2TB external SSD for my media files.

[Ashley James]

Thanks Bill. I’m trying to decide between bleeding edge tech vs a 2019 iMac i7 for an upcoming project. Anyone else got an opinion?

[Bill Celnick]

Hi Ashley

I set my new Mac Mini M1 up yesterday and redid an edit of a project I did last week on my PC, and overall I’m very impressed. Although it’s on some levels apples to oranges, here are my set-ups, and impressions.

The Mac:

M1 16GB Ram, 1 TB Hard Drive, external Samsung SSD connected via bus-powerd hub.

The PC: Puget Systems (2016)

64 GB Ram, Geoforce 1070, ssd system drive, Seagate 7200 rpm Spindle drive -internal

The edit:

-a youth musical performance – 67 minutes shot with 4 cameras and external audio mixed in.

-3 cameras shot 4K 2160 – h.264

-1 camera – AVCHD 1080p

-Within Premiere: no transcoding to another codec after ingest, no proxies created.
Sequence settings AVC-Intra 1080p

-Did not use multicam – directly placed all tracks on timeline

-used cross dissolves for every transition – about 300 in total

-reframed and rescaled much of the 4K footage

-adjusted brightness and contrast minimally

-applied a LUT via an adjustment layer to the whole timeline (applied after all other edits made)

Results:

-timeline playback: at full resolution PC hung more than the mac, mac worked best at ¼ resolution

Export: for our purposes we exported an h.264 file to Mediazialla’s recommended settings which is 1 pass 20 bit.

The PC exported the file in 43 minutes, the Mac in 55 minutes. I’m fine with that considering the price tag.

For me – the real test will come when I have a project that requires warp stabilization and Neat Video noise reduction – particularly Neat Video – it does a phenomenal job, but slows my renders and exports down considerably.

Overall after 24 hours, I’m very happy with my purchase.

I hope this helps.

[Bill Celnick]

PS: My final export is 1080P – 9GB file