This video was edited on the Macbook, 2 4k video tracks and the screen recording on a 1080p timeline in Multicam, flawless on the timeline allowing me to hop between angles easily and then rendered out in just under 4 minutes (remember the screen recording renders super quick!)!! All while on battery AND I haven't charged since I unplugged in the video a few hours ago and I'm currently on 62% battery!!
You mean to say it rendered an almost 20min video in 4min? Isn't that like 5x real time? Damn, and on battery too! Good stuff man! Just one question, next time could you please show the activity monitor when you're on DaVinci for a future video? I would like to see if the stutters seen in the video are due to insufficient RAM or GPU bottleneck. Thanks a lot! Keep up the great work!
@@eddydrouet1888 Yes, but bare in mind that the screen recording is relatively low bitrate pre rendered video so exports really fast. A 4k (or 1080p) normal video wouldn't export quite that fast 🙂👍
@@MrAlexTech oh thanks for the info, I had no idea that screen captures were easy to export! How about the bottlenecks on the system? Do you think they're thermal, RAM or GPU bound for Resolve?
This is AMAZING. I was running resolve on my PC with RTX 2060 and 16GB ram and Ryzen 5 3600x now it was LAGGY as heckk. editing used to take me so long because of how laggy the footages were. Now I can just edit on my Macbook Air.
It's nice to hear somebody give it an honest review. Sounds like me and you are kind of in the same boat I have a PC with rx 580 with Ryzen 7 2700x 32gb of ram. I just couldn't believe how fast the Mac was.
just ordered the MBA M1 2020 refurbished from amazon in 6-1-24 I will be learning da Vinci resolve 18 so this video really puts my mind to rest that my MBA will be able to handle my simple projects of editing video and audio from krita and da Vinci 😀
Hey Alex, how is the overall performance within the fusion tab? Im not a fan of mac but if what Im hearing about the Mac m1 chips is true then maybe I will be willing to tolerate it lol. Can it take a beating in fusion?
Hey dude. Surprisingly well, it's the one place it actually beats my PC!!! I made a horrible fusion project with loads going on and it previews and renders the fastest out of my pc, windows laptop and Air. It's slower elsewhere especially using GPU accelerated effects. But for general fusion usage, it's impressive.
That is incredible, mine takes min 1.5 hours to render and without anywhere near your level of effects 🤣 Had to stop adding them as took far to long, or would keep crashing. Great video and love the mac
Can you let us know how the M1 handles the Fusion tab - 2D motion graphics, 3D and particles? How does the M1 handle those, given that Blackmagic Design says Fusion requires 32GB of RAM?
Indeed. I have a 16GB Macbook Pro (intel) and was initially worried. However, I think BMD may be stating those specs for professional use (complex 4k/8k work). Many people will get along fine with lower I suspect. I've tried basic fusion stuff and it seems to cope fine.
As is mentioned below, that recomendation is based on older macs. Given the fact the M1 is pretty much outstripping almost their entire intel range of computers, the 8gb ram is a very different proposition in the M1 machines, vs the regular ones
The M1 Mac Mini is a dream come true. It's dirt cheap and native DaVinci Resolve performance is stellar. I was able to put most of my budget into a beautiful, color accurate monitor, which is arguably more important than the computer itself. I was initially skeptical, but I was wrong. Thank you, Apple. Happy to see you innovating again.
Same here, I bought it the 16gb version, 256gb mac mini. I bought a 1tb t7 samsung ssd for putting all my projects on. And I have recently started editing on my mac instead of my gaming pc. Not as fast but very close, and waay more fun to work in mac os than in windows. I like to use final cut pro as well as davinci resolve.
the right video at the right moment. i've just started editing 4k vid with my old pc but man...it's melting down and can't export at all. So i tought, it'd be cool if Resolve runs good on the new macbook air m1...ta daaa. i think you just sold me my first MacBook air. Thanks for the video
Thanks for the review.I recently got a Macbook Air 2018 model and is using Davinci resolve 16 on it for my fishing videos and I'm so impressed with the performance. I downloaded DAVINCI Resolve 17 but must still try it. First time using a MacBook and is very impressed
It takes a fair amount of courage to gamble £700+ that the new M1 Mac will have sufficient power to meet the needs of even high-end hobbyists such as myself. My camcorder outputs HEVC 10bit 420 4k 50p, and preferably I would like to keep that format right to the end when using Resolve Studio for cutting and grading so that no quality is lost - otherwise why did I spend all that money on a good camcorder !? . Alex, I think your videos are well thought through and fair. I watch every one. But many RU-vid contributors just seem to groupthink and demonstrate 8 bit 4k 25p (often mp4), and then extol the wonderfulness without further thought. It's too easy, and after a while it just becomes so much clickbait. I haven't seen a single HEVC 4k 10bit 50p/60p test anywhere on RU-vid. Many have shelled out for the 8gb M1 mac memory version only. Meaningful metrics (for video editors) of 8gb vs 16gb are difficult to find. I guess we'll just have to be patient. If I could see clear evidence that the M1 could handle my requirements I'd order one like a shot. I was expecting to invest a huge wedge on a Threadripper 3960X and 64gb and RTX3080 sometime in the New Year to just stay in the game. That's a lot of dosh for a hobbyist.
So many cool things about this video. Here are my top three: 1. You used the correct "I honestly could not care less" - it drives me nuts every time I hear people say, "I could care less," when they really mean that they don't care. Well done. 2. "Just call this, 'Untitled 2.' Oops, already have that one..." Changes it to 'Untitled 21' 3. Oh, and the M1 MacBook looks pretty cool, too. Unreal how a first-generation, 8GB, $1K laptop can handle what it can - without a fan. It's like they have a million tiny magic voodoo gerbils spinning away under the hood...
@@Coatsey007 Don't get me wrong, I know Apple are a good brand it's just the limitations of upgrading the unit in a year's time. The devices are short of simple things like usb ports etc for multiple items required nowadays. I just find unnecessary hurdles with apple which a Windows system doesn't give you. Just a personal opinion from me really. Might sound selfish as well (hope it don't) but I haven't had to spend money to see how this system operates. Thank you Mr Alex Tech - Keep up the great work
Can you test it with a moderately complex fusion comp? Maybe something with 3D? I am really interested in the gpu performance but I haven’t seen any video yet that covers Fusion
@@radiantav its kind of hard to tell at the moment.. this isn't a normal CPU/GPU/RAM configuration. its an entirely new structure. well have to wait and see when apple makes official machines for heavy workloads. you just watched a Mac air.
The first technique you should learn about using Macs is Expose and all other touchpad swiping shortcuts. You won’t be able to go back to Windows afterwards.
17.3 update is rolled out today. Very much interested in knowing 2-3x performance improvements for image processing on Apple Silicon. Does it do this gain in Color & fusion pages?
Hey. I'll have to do some investigating, i think it's generally timeline performance but I'll see what info I can find out. I've tested some renders and the export is considerably faster.
Thanks Alex, as always nicely done. I wait until next year and the iMacs with M1 chips. In the meantime current iMac and DaVinci Resolve working just fine.
Excellent review Alex, thanks. Do you have any feedback on Air vs Pro? This latter is considered superior for obvious reasons. However, as we plan to produce videos on the go, we travel by bicycle, the weight and screen size (not as small as a 14" nor too bulky as a 16") would make us lean towards the Air - if performance were acceptable. As we type this comment, the Air with M3 just got released... Thanks for your feedback!
Can u make a video on facial tracking and image tracking in general on davinci. Your videos have been super helpful for the videos I've been editing and it would be amazing if you could do one on facial tracking, because so far I have failed to find one up to snuff.
Alex, now some six months or more since this video and I am wondering if you chose the M1 Mac over the Windows laptop, if that is the case do you have any comments to offer regarding its performance with the latest (current) version of Da Vinci Resolve? Do you feel there is any difference in performance or any other issues/benefits you have noted. Thanks in advance for your comments.
I’m so excited! Finally just picked up a base MacBook Air M1 and am pumped to see how it handles my a7IV footage! My old i9 9900k and RTX 2080 was just having a ROUGH time with the footage. If this vid is any tell, I’m going to have a way better time. 🤩
@@alzyde - So... It would work for short-bursty work loads. However, whenever I would edit a video for longer than 2-5 hours, I kept running into slow downs. From a mix of only having 8gbs of ram and the laptop getting a little too hot. So, I've since switched to an M1 pro with 1TB SSD and have had 0 complaints. My overall synopsis: short works loads, this thing KILLS. However, if you edit content like weddings or longer commercial videos like me. The M1 pro is what you're looking for.
Yeah, but I believe thats based on old mac machines... Not on the new M1 chip stuff... its a pretty different propect at this point, when those 8GB ram M1 airs our out performing Macbook Pros with more ram.
really nice! I love that you actually show a timeline with edits, transitions, color and effects. Most guys just show exports or very simple projects that don’t reflect real use. Also, could you perhaps test out exporting to DNxHR or prores? I find resolve h.264 has bad quality, and I use better codecs which I then transcode to h.264 using handbrake.
it is optimised for it - it's the beta... 17.1! If you download straight from the site it doesn't give you the M1 beta. I had to specifically search "davinci resolve m1" and that's when that came up
That's the first real life review I have seen. On a MBA, that is just superb. I can only imagine the MBP will be better again. Caveat, I am a retired Apple Mac technician so I might be biased, lol. I note you mention about the battery life below. I will be interested to see how that continues. Thanks as always Alex for a real review :). Out of interest, how does the spec compare with your Windows laptop?
awesome comparation @MrAlexTech :-) thanks for the effort ! only 1 question, did you upload the project + footage for testing comparisions on the community that is not lucky enough to have their hands on a Mac M1 (just yet) ... I have a pretty good machine (i7 12 cores + rx580 8gb + 32GB RAM + dual m2 hackintosh) and I would very satisfy to benchmark my machinne agains this M1 as I am pretty sure that will be getting one sooner than later 🙂 Keep up the hard work ! very satisfying videos mate ! congratulations for the channel
answering just myself here (lol) maybe there is a new idea for another video ... publishing a "standar project" for us to download and compile and sending you stats that can be compared against your M1 machines ;-) ... just saying ... I'd love to see that real performance comparison while exporting davinci projects on several machines with the same reference point
Thanks for the demo! Out of curiosity, seen as the render time was impacted quite significantly by the screen record, do you find scrubbing/playing back etc on the timeline does also improve somwhat when not screen recording? I appreciate it's not really quantifiable but would be interesting to know if things get even better with that turned off!
Thanks a lot for this test ! Could you try something with a green screen, or at least something with the magic mask feature, as I'm working with this kind of things and I would like to know how the M1 handles this :) Thanks again for all your videos 👍
Im using the Mac Mini M1 with 16GB RAM. I must admit, its good for Davinci Resolve. I only make short one song length videos and the main workload for me is the audio, which is not resource hungry, as I mix down with Studio One. I do use fusion though (to make my videos consistently coloured etc) and whilst it can stutter for a short while, its only lens correction for fish eye that really cripples it. I'd be curious as to whether the Studio only fisheye tool would struggle too. My findings were similar to yours. I doubt I could build a PC for the same money which handles video editing and rendering like this does. I use the free version which I believe is limited to how many processor and graphic cores it can address? (I read that somewhere..). It certainly makes my i5 MacBook Pro (2017) look a bit lame. I found your video useful and interesting, thanks.
I think that having that laptop as my first ever laptop is not 100% good. Now I feel like 4 days of battery life and 8GB of RAM to run the Adobe Suite with no fan is “normal”. I never felt the jump 😅 so I don’t know when something is impressive or normal on my M1. Anyways, great video and I’m really gonna give DaVinci Resolve a go
What do you suggest paying for final cut pro or Resolve. They're both pretty much the same price. I need the cinema 4k export. Which one do you suggest is better for time line scrubbing and color editing *for the macbook m1*
Hi Alex! Can you test 4K 24/60fps 10 Bit 4:2:0 H265 footage? I’m wondering if the AirM1 can handle these files or If I would have to create optimized media 🤔😇
Hey Alex, I bought the M1 just before Christmas and I also really like it. However I've just tried to do a voiceover on it and it sounds horrendous!! I've had to buy a Flepow hub so I could plug my Samson C01upro microphone in as the Air only has two usb C ports. I don't see anything different that I have done in the past. In fact I opened up an old video recording and recorded on that in case I changed a setting somewhere and it sounded horrendous on that too, even though the original voiceover was perfect with the same setup. Have you come across this before? How do you edit your voiceoverf on the M1? Any idea how to fix it? Cheers
I bought a Windows laptop. It's Dell Inspiron 7500 with an i7, Nvidia GTX 1650, 1TB NVME, 16GB RAM. At first it performed fantastic but after a few FORCED windows updates it started to freeze on me and not sleep and wake up properly. It's got all kind of issues now because of forced windows updates. I'm so frustrated with it. It can barely run Lightroom now, it keeps flashing to a black screen. I've tried updating video drivers, updating motherboard drivers, updating dell drivers to no avail. I've changed settings in Lightroom and it still flashes the black screen. I would absolutely stay away from Windows machines until they STOP forcing updates.
Actually what matters to me is how it handles 4K@120fps 10-bit with audio, 280Mbps. My main PC chokes with this one and need to optimize media for it, but for 4K@24-60fps 10-bit it runs seamless with no hassle. Still this looks impressive for a studio laptop while keeping my PC at home.
I am quite impressed by the time it took to render this video, now my question is, have you tried to edit and render H265 format videos and add 3 quality noise reduction and luma, how long does it take to render this video on the M1? ? I guess it will take more time?
Alex do you normally do your editing on your PC or on your laptop? If on PC do you mind to share the spec? Thanks for today's video. Have a nice weekend.
As I learned the mp4 imported must use more power than .mov or raw. My knowledge is that is the most demanding format. It may work better with braw or mov pro-res footage?
Hi Alex another well informed video as usual. You say that a PC spec for the same cost would be faster. Is this conjecture or do you know this for a fact? If it is fact how would you spec the PC in general terms to work faster than the M1 chip macbook air for Davinci Resolve?
Retime and scaling really fucks it up tho. Ive been using the resolve 17, not the studio version. My Macbook Pro 2020 really struggles with retime and scaling, gunning the fan like a jet. Now I have no idea whether its the laptop or the resolve version which need bugs to fixed.
I am using the Mac Mini M1 with 16GB RAM. Editing 4K videos without Fusion is fine. Once I got into Fusion, adding something not so complicated, then it struggles. Maybe the future M1X or M2 will "resolve" that in Resolve. This Mac M1 is a lot better/faster than my previous late-2018 Mac Mini with Intel i7, the Intel i7 couldn't even do 1080p editing smoothly as it has no GPU at all.
I’m currently using a MacBook Pro 2013 version and at mo I have the free version but getting the speed editor when it turns up I will have the paid version on my MacBook Pro 2013 as I’m also trying to make my own app
would u be so precious to mention more about heating? i'm so not knowing if should get the pro just bc of the fan? i'm a beginner, but really working on having more sophisticated music-videos than how they look now... they're 20 minutes long, and as soon as i have new computer with resolve studio version, i'll be using NR and all :) cheers!
At 7:00, I see that deleting the clip automatically deletes the gap between the remaining 2 clips. Is there a setting for this in DaVinci Resolve that I can turn on?
I have the new Mac Mini M1 16gb. The ProRes 4k clips from my BMPC 4k are stuttering like on the older machine . I'm not able to play smoothly one single clip. Only SSDs.
As always thank you so much for your helpful info, super appreciate it! I wondered if you know of anyone successfully running DaVinci Resolve 17 on a 2015 MacBook Pro? I’m running 16 with no problems and I’d like to download the 17 version, now that it’s out of Beta, but I’m hesitant as I want to make sure it’s going to run as well as 16 is currently running... any thoughts or input would be greatly appreciated!
I tried out the 8GB version with a real project with a good amount of footage, color grading, timelines, etc and it couldn't handle it, constant ram warnings, and force quitting resolve. I returned it and got a 16GB mac mini and it has been great so far, no ram warnings and it has been as good or better at most video editing things than the pc I built which has monster specs. I'm pretty impressed with this little a1 chip. It also runs Kyno way smoother in case anyone uses that in their workflow.
Thank you very much for your comment! I am considering to buy M1 mini! Are you saying that 8 Gb of memory is not enough? Are you running DR 17.1 specifically designed for M1 support. Is Black Magic going to continue supporting this version for M1? What do you think?
Good overview. 4k and beyond is here to stay because of marketing, but I am starting to think that these high resolutions are gimmicks. The general consumer can not tell 1080 from 4k content. The real question is should we even bother? 84-inch TVs are never going to be mainstream. In smaller screen sizes, 4K just isn't worth the money. Thoughts?
I think it’s a substantial difference. By substantial it may be around 10% difference, but when you start adding 10% here, 10% there (say a better lens, or 10 bit video), that is how you get a great image
Great review thanks. Please could you do a test with stabilization and tracking an object i.e. mountain biker drone shot and text following the rider across the frame. Also I'm interested in the workflow, moving to a laptop with a smaller SSD, do you have to move all the files onto the laptop, complete the project and then archive to external NAS or Cloud?
Pretty impressive. I wonder if your render cache is set on a 5 second delay? You did use the M1 version of Resolve from the support Page of Blackmagic I guess?
Awesome...... Just picked up a Sony FX3 and it uses 10bit footage. My laptop is struggling so am lookign at the M1. Have you have a chance to test with 4.2.2 10Bit footage?
Hi AleX, Always informative and to the point. On other web site i've seen very bad performance (very hi temp, slowdown...) of Apple Macbook with M1 with Resolve 17 beta for proxy creation..but really want to see your expert editor point of view for this matter, which is imho more related to the " Beta" state of the app than HW.... Can you please make a test ? and post here your opinon ? Thanks. Cris
