Do you think an M1 iMac could replace your current Mac? Why or why not? Also, check out TotalAV at www.totalav.com/lukemiani to get their antivirus suite for $19 per year!
FinalCut is pretty good with 4K. Drop resolution and I can do a 4k edit on an 8gb dual core i5 MacBook pro. But as soon as you do multicam it falls apart. The new ones just sail though it! (And yes, Windows can do it for "cheaper", but $70/mth for Adobe crashing all the time makes Apple actually cheaper for me in terms of time and subscription fees)
I am not surprised about the performance. Over the weekend, I was editing a virtual choir video that has 109 videos. 80% of them are 1080P and the rest 720P.. 95% of these videos have color correction and other effects. At the end of the editing process I have ALL 109 videos on screen at the same time, there are 4 compound clips, that are inside of a 4 quadrant effect (that has an animation). I was originally editing this on my 2019 iMac 3.6 i9 with 40GB of ram. Can you imagine how much fun it was to edit this video in that situation. Well after hours of waiting around to do anything I decided to pack this up, move the project to my M1 MBP (8GB ram) and see if I could finish the edit there, and guess what? I was able to finish this monster of a project in about 30 minutes. For me this just proves the power of Apple Silicone, and I will be first in line to get a new next-gen top of the line iMac, or Mac Pro. If you want to see what 109 layers of video look like, let me know.
Great video. I guess over a decade of optimizing Apple Silicon to function under all the constraints of being inside an iPhone shows up in the performance of the user interface. The other main differentiator is the way improved hardware implemented CODECS for more recent 4K (and 8K) video formats. If you had the Big MacPro tower or a Windows box, you could update the graphics card every year and those 18 Xeon cores would do everything you need for the next 15 years. Obviously what Apple’s done with an iPhone SOC in their entry level computers is impressive. By the end of 2022 when they’ve migrated their pro line to more workstation like CPU cores, it might be time to replace your Xeon iMacPro.
Just shows how well the Hardware and Software works together! The next 27" iMac (or it's replacement) is going to be epic! M1X or whatever it will be called!
Thank you for not trashing the M1 iMac for being slower like other channels have. Like you say, $10,000 machine vs. $1300 machine. Some other reviewers have been comparing it like it's the same price! For my uses, all I want is a computer than can keep up with my spreadsheets, word documents, music, web browsing etc. Nothing more. I am not patient, so I need something fast and responsive. My needs changed, and I sold my Mac Book Air M1 as soon as this came out, and I got my hands on one. This is my first ever iMac - having owned 3 MacBook Airs over the last 10 years. Must say, I am happily throwing away my old PC speaker system, and selling the second screen I used to have. The 23.5" display is more than enough space for me not to need two screens, and like you I am super happy with the design of it. I did go for the £1,649 model, purely because I wanted 512 storage, but that's more for longevity for me. Also, I wanted the extra ports, and now understand it has an extra fan also. Perhaps the base model would have been fine, but this year my business has done well, and I have the funds to pay - of course it's offset against my tax :)
Luke, I wasn’t surprised at all. That iMac Pro is a beast of a PC. I think you’ll switch back eventually to the iMac Pro eventually. See you soon iMac Pro. 😉
I’m using the m1 Mac mini. My videos are far less complexed than yours, but I am loving it. Being able to actually edit 4k60 and not have to lower the resolution of the timeline is amazing. I’m still using Davinci resolve because it is what I know and works so good but I do have 3 months of Final Cut Pro installed but I’m not sure I want to try it cuz if I do end up liking it then that’s 300$ I gotta spend lol.
I've had the sound issue also. Here's the scoop: -Running an M1 macbook Pro, 8-core GPU, 16GB, 1TB -I live in Logic Pro X; 8-10 hours per week -issue occurred twice since November '20; mid action, sound drops, no explanation -solution was to restart Macbook (issue occured across apps and sound was dropped while streaming vids in Safari) Luke, you're a boss! Love your work, man!
I’m getting that audio issue on my MacBook Air. Happens every couple of days. It fixes itself when I leave if for a minute or two - but it’s quicker to close and relaunch
Hello, have the same problems. I try on several Mac m1, and it the same results....there is no sound when I move or work on rushes. it coms back when I quit and restart fop, or after several minutes....did you solve this problem?
@15:00, I agree completely. It cannot be understated what Apple has designs on what's to come. The base 8gb ram is ok for now, but consumers will ultimately force Apple to boost the base model to minimum 16gb ram.
The high end configs of it will be able to play back 4 8K30fps videos in Final Cut. And that won’t even be Apple’s highest end SoC, that’ll be the M1Z with 32 high performance and 4-8 high efficiency cores, and 128 GPU cores. And maybe an even higher end SoC in the future, if the rumors Luke reported on are correct (128 CPU cores, 256 GPU cores).
@@utubekullanicisi I wonder how big the actual silicon will be given how big (or small) their current M1 package is. It would have to be 16 times bigger for 128 cores alone I think, maybe less if it's at 2 or 3nm. But still, 128 cores is no joke. Just look at how big AMD Threadripper 3990X is with just 64 cores.
I bought 2 macbook air(for my wife and me) in november to replace my 2014 fully specced MacBook Pro for video editing for our small RU-vid channel. Couldn’t have made better change. It’s blazing fast, no noise. A lot lighter to travel… but we noticed on our first video the audio problem u mentioned. It’s annoying Apple hasn’t fixed it since launch of M1 Macs. Great channel Luke! And nice change of decor 😁 Bjorn
Excellent down to earth real life (no waffling) honest video of the iMac 24 Vs iMac 27 pro. I'm sold, in fact I have ordered one with extra ports and 16gb ram.
I love this iMac. 😍 Ever since it came out, I’ve been struggling to resist the tempation of buying it (to replace my 2019 non-retina iMac)….mostly because I already have both the MacBook Pro M1 (bought on Amazon) and MacBook Air M1 (won in a giveaway) and considering the use my family does of our “old” iMac, we don’t really need this new one. 🤗🤗
Audio issue does also occasionally happen with a non-M1 mac 20205k iMac, Have you noticed that on the right-hand side inspector windows the scroll bars are missing even if they are set to always show in the system preferences? you need to use the scroll function on the mouse to make them appear if you need to scroll for add-on's. A big deal for most people but I use an upright RSI friendly mouse and pretty much can't use FCPX as I used to anymore since last update as I can't scroll without an apple mouse. It's also super annoying that FCPX does not keep preferences for Skimming, Insta snap, thumbnail size and style. Find they change frequently without me doing anything
Something I don’t think most people even realize is that base model 1300 dollar iMacs have 7 grafix cores not 8 that can be found on the higher 1500 dollar model , however there are also dual fans and a heat pipe on the 1500 dollar model which does help with rendering videos , also an extra 8 gb of ram would have helped you out a lot there bro , Also I enjoyed the video keep them comming
I've had a similar audio issue on a non-M1 mac for a few months. This is what works for me: Open Activity Monitor, find the coreaudiod process, and terminate it. It respawns automatically and audio output resumes normally. YMMV.
@@florider_hd My current PC has 512 GB as well with about 160 GB free after exactly three years. So 256 GB wasn't an option for me. If 512 GB will not be enough, I'd buy an external SSD though, the "official" upgrades are way too expensive in my opinion.
Great review. It seems the on die RAM is more like a fast L2 cache that's keeping thing moving, if they can make that system work with some proper off die RAM then we'll be in business.
I'll never ditch 18 cores for a blucking M1 8GB of ram. Export times mean more to me than anything. Using a proxy workflow for 4k is the way to go always. Going to wait for things to catch up before making the leap.
for the soud issue on final cut a french youtuber named theicollection has the same with his macbook pro M1 and the reason was the video format i think but idk how he fix it
First off, I appreciate your non-biased point of view when you make videos like this, Luke. Second, I have a similarly spec'd custom PC (the build is almost 2 years old at this point) to your iMac Pro I use that's connected to my 49" 4k LG SmartTV (webOS and all that) for when I wanna play certain game consoles I have (to stream/consume content on a large screen etc) and it's fast... It's got a Ryzen 9 3900X with 32 GB of RAM and I dual boot with Windows 10 and Void Linux (Void Linux being my main/preferred OS most of the time. I have Win10 there for emergencies/testing/convenience). I also recently got an M1 Mac mini (mid tier I guess?) with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of SSD storage onboard. I have an 8TB drive connected over USB (non-C) for storage for projects I'm doing. I use BlackMagic Design DaVinci Resolve as my NLVE (NonLinearVideoEditor) of choice because I grew up using the various versions of Adobe Premiere basically since version 1 and Resolve has a similar layout at least in my eyes. I've also not bothered to learn FCP properly, but maybe some day I will. It's M1 optimized and it works great. With all that said, this Ryzen 9 is NO SLOUCH WHATSOEVER.. If I have to or need to edit/render some video on here (using the open-source and up and coming NLVE called Olive, since Resolve hates certain Linux distros) with my slightly older AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB (this machine is hilariously all AMD) I have a great time doing it. Now granted, I've not done any strict benchmarking between my two powerhouse machines, but when it comes to my M1 mini I was able to export my unboxing video of it (13 min of footage 1080p footage, but still footage) in like 5-6 min or something like that. My Ryzen 9 here with its 12 cores and 24 threads would probably do it faster, but the M1 platform is no slouch either. I'm happy with both systems, but if I had to choose one and only one I'd totally go with my M1 Mac mini partially because I like macOS given I grew up watching it evolve into what it's become today, and because it's not Windows.... lol joking aside thank you for making this video. It was very interesting to watch. Keep em coming! Congrats on breaching 300k subs! You deserve it! I'll keep watching! I ain't goin' nowhere. lol :)
Love the 24” design. My only qualm is I have a 27” Thunderbolt 2.5K Display so if a baseline larger iMac with 16 Gb is available b4 end of year for say $600 to $700 more than a similar memory/ ssd capacity then I would be all in! My 2012 15” hi-res MacBook Pro is still going strong. But using the Thunderbolt Display with a similarly sized larger iMac would be stunning! Great channel🙏🏻
I keep on waiting for someone to make an honest review of M1 macs for editing. Everyone raves about them, but noone wants to say what we - editors on M1 macs already know - they are only faster if all you edit is plain vanilla FCPX with plain footage. 99% of plugins still don't work natively on M1 and considering it's been 8 months now - it doesn't look like they ever will, at least not without us paying for them twice. Yes, Rosetta layer is available, but at that point new issues are introduced and all the speed advantage stemming from app optimisation and memory addressing is gone. And make no mistake about it - it is mostly in-app optimisation, you can see it for yourself - chuck some random mp4 footage to FCPX on M1 and Intel - Intel will start conforming the footage, despite graphics being fully capable of accelerating h264 or HEVC, M1 will just use your source as proxy and work straight off it. That's not some magical architecture - that's just optimisation of app to create advantages. New versions of FCPX will even conform Prores on Prores timeline on Intel chips. The only real advantage of architecture on M1 is memory to bus access and addressing, which allows for fast swapping of tens of gigs of data which otherwise would need physical memory. No review talks about three other issues in M1 macs, which almost every editor already encountered: - because it's an iPad chip they crippled Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 speeds - you'll need your storage devices plugged into properly licensed external hub to get full bandwidth and even then you'll loose about 20% of speed compared to Intel macs. - artificial crippling of TB3 for multiple display devices. For most M1's - that limit is one display on HDMI and one display on TB3. It won't support dGPU either. Make no mistake - it's an artificial limit, possibly because Apple didn't see a reason to pay full license for something that was meant to be in iPad only? - external display issues. This might not show its ugly head on iMac yet, but M1 MacPro and M1 Mac Mini users know what I'm talking about - random flicker, vertical lines and ghosting on images displayed on dark backgrounds. Plus pink squares - check mac forums for hundreds of reports, not acknowledged by Apple and still unresolved 8 months later. Don't get a wrong impression - I'm not anti M1, I own M1 device (in addition to four other Intel Macs). M1 is fine toy. But don't get overboard with all these reviews raving about base M1 macs beating $10,000 pro macs in video and audio editing. It looks good on RU-vid, but in reality, unless all you do is edit simple blogs, it's a nightmare in real life at the moment - lack of ports, lack of capture devices, lack of full speed data buses, lack of third party plugins supporting this architecture natively, and tons of random incompatibilities and hardware issues noone wants to acknowledge. If you want bedroom browsing machine - get M1 iMac, if you want to edit audio or video for living - skip this generation. Completely. Don't listen to any RU-vidrs. M1 is an early, severely crippled demo, it's got bus issues and drawbacks of mobile device port. Trust me. It's bad enough that Big Sure is a Windows Vista of MacOSes, save your $1500 and just skip M1 completely until you see them releasing Silicone chips with full memory support. Once you can get next gen Silicon mac with 64Gb of ram - jump on it.
Insane! I love editing FCP on my M1 Mac mini, but didn't expect it to be a better overall experience then editing on a iMac Pro. Great video! I see now why Apple discontinued iMac Pro right away....intel in now just an embarrassment to them, lol
My biggest complaint about iMacs has always been having the plugs in the back. It's clear Apple is OK with port hubs, which makes getting the plugs to the front possible. Puzzling why they opted for a 3.5 mm jack for the headphone instead of Lightning, since they dumped all the 3.5's on all the phones long ago. But to answer your question, I'm super impressed that a $1,300 machine can give your Pro a run for its money. A "Real" comparison, though, would be a 27" M1 with 2 TB and 16 Gb RAM. That machine, were it to exist, would be ~$2,500. And so a real comparison is more like 25% of the price, not 10%. And it would impress. By golly, it would impress.
I think personally I’d just sell the iMac Pro now or soon before the next model is announced, bank the ~$4k for the time being, and then consider upgrades or replacements to the base model upon next release.
There is a special place in my heart for the Xeon chips. They may not currently be the fastest but they are super reliable and EVERYTHING runs on them.
Hello from France!!!! Finally someone having the same problem in fcp!!!!!!! I had hours with thé assistance to understand and....nothing. They don’t know (MacBook m1 256g and 8 gigas). I have tried with the Mac of my brother (m1, 8 gigas and 512 ssd), same result. I make all on external ssd.....next test, i think of selling it to buy a 16gigas ram.
Luke your Raid doesn’t have more than one TB port? That said the OWC, Anker and CalDigit Element hubs are dope and replicate ports. I have all three and the perform the same. CD has the most USB A so it helps a lot. Great Video
Good video, Luke. I have just recently begun running Resolve on my Minimac M1. Yes, audio problem here like you have experienced. I had to restart to get audio back.
I sometimes have an audio issue on my MacBook Pro 2019 and going to the Audio-MIDI-Settings and change the "Format" back and forth works for me most of the time. Just a suggestion for improvement for the graphs you showed on your latest videos: It would be easier to interpret them more quickly, if you would add something like a "< is better" or "> is better" or anything in this direction to the heading (or below). Oh yeah, btw: Contragratulations to 300k subscribers. :party:
Wish tech tubers could get on the same page😂 Luke and several others claims and show that the M1 is fully capable for this kind of work whereas others trash it for being either slow or incapable of doing the same work/exports etc…
6:11 personnally even though not being able to hear the fans is GREAT, when editing 4k i would use something like istat to raise the fan speed and get better performance.
Logitech bluetooth audio adapter (you plug the jackplug of your powered speakers into it - or cinch) and pair the Mac with the Logitech audio device and you'll have audio without the jackplug being an issue. I use several of these.
Sometimes you need the RAM. I used to have a HP Dual CPU workstation with half a Terabyte of Ram, and for some of my 4 billion polygon renders, it still wasn't really enough.
@@10p6 Interesting. I never knew what benefits/use cases all that ram would have, now the 1.5 terabytes of ram on the Mac Pro doesn’t sound as ridiculous. It’s still expensive though lol
One of my best friends is a programmer who exclusively uses MacOS. He says he's not upgrading until they offer 128 gigs of ECC RAM in their desktop (over the 64 in his iMac Pro) and I don't blame him.
@@dial2616 Yeah makes sense. Personally, I have 16 gb on my 15 MacBook Pro, if not only because that was the standard (I think? It’s a 2016). But I love it, I can’t imagine only having 8. It would be so limiting. But if I’m going to upgrade, I would consider at least getting 32. I don’t really do heavy stuff on my MacBook, but maybe I will down the line. I’m not sure
@@halami2149 MacOS is notoriously memory intensive, so having more is always better. Unfortunately, it looks like having more RAM also doubles the swapfile (for paging purposes) meaning that it could potentially decrease SSD lifespan even further.
It’s like comparing a Dodge Challenger Hellcat and a prius. Even tho the hellcat is much much powerful, it lacks efficiency in gas mileage in which results in more trips to your local gas station. the Prius is slow and whatnot but it’s so efficient where it would allow you to get to a longer distance without having to have a more frequent times to go to the gas station.
From a budget conscious perspective, a $1300 base iMac that allows for useable, functional 4k editing, it opens up the market for a wider range of potential users. Even from the perspective of a secondary editing system, it's quite a boon, even just as a portent of future things to come with M based systems.
Here to say that I do experience the sound bug quite often on my Mac Mini M1 while using final cut pro. It happens more or less once for every project. I only close FC and reopen.
My biggest issue about the M1 iMac is the screen. It is awesome quality but when you get used to a bigger screen with plenty of space for all the tools and previews it is hard to go down in size for everyday use.
After much consideration, I believe that the Best Buy is the 1499 one (the middle one, 8core and 4 ports one) why? Because it’s the one that gives you the most bank for your buck, because the 2 ports one is too much of a compromise and the higher end one is just the memory ‘“apple tax” that said, the only two things you must get is that extra ram and one of those Amazon dongles that has various usb A and card reader (Ihaveone for my iPad and it performs flawlessly) I feel that the 4 ports ones will retain value better and 16gb will future proof for at least 2 more years,
Dang, I hope you'll be able to get our paws on a better M1 iMac. 16GB memory and 8-core GPU. I've heard bigger Storage might also help. I'd love to know if these enhancements fix the issues you encountered.
I use the M1 mac mini and i have encountered the sound loss problem. I also see that FCPX is using up to 7gb of ram when there is multiple layers of footage, which drops a lot of frames.
I haven't experienced the sudden "audio not playing in FCP on M1" bug as you have. I've had my M1 Mac mini for 6 months, but I use 4k iPhone footage....strange
I have a 2019 27' iMac with intel i9 and 64GB ram but since I got the Blackmagic 6k camera, premier or DaVinci can't handle editing scrubbing for more than a few min and rendering out only works on short 5min chunks before the iMac looses power and shuts off. No other applications running and no other programs cause this issue.
I wasnt surprised at all to see the good performance. I have a M1 Mac mini, and it outperforms all the Intel core i9 laptops that my other colleagues have when compiling apps in xcode, even if I have half of Ram (16 vs 32). And price it was 1100€ vs 3400€
I'm a little concerned about the longevity of the M1 imac in that use case. If you were doing the same workload that you did on the imac pro it would be putting an insane load on the ram and soldered SSD swapping between the two. If you did this for years the computer may be kaput after 2-3 years.
be interested to see an example of a failure. some memory blocks may stop being used so capacity would decrease slightly, still think it would pull though 8 - 10 years without going kaput
I rarely make any comments, but I wanted to here. I'm a tech, not a video editor. I have the M1 Mac mini, and like you, I am very impressed by it when I have so much stuff open. I went for the 16GB RAM option with the standard 256 storage. My thinking is, I'm seriously wondering if your rendering/exporting issues would be resolved by having more RAM. Yeah, you'd have to replace the whole thing, but I think you'd be really ready to ditch the 10k machine. Just my thoughts though, I could be wrong. I replaced a Mac mini with 32GB RAM and it is able to handle things better. All I miss is being able to use Parallels for my Windows testing and boot camp being available. But I didn't get rid of what I had. Great work on this!
I am just waiting for the bigger one. I don‘t need so much power for my normal office work. I always liked the iMac. I am still working with a 4 years old iMac 27. I am sure the next ones will even be better and quicker
Question… after spending this time explaining how the $1.3k machine is better, or at least very close in performance, how much will you sell the older one for?
