M3 Max Macbook Pro review: best computer for Davinci Resolve? 

brother did a mac review into a crime investigation interview. 10/10

Only experienced users will feel in their bones the truth oozing from this review. Daily workflow plagued by errors and sudden crashes is something that every heavy user dealing with graphics on Windows PC knows. After some time everyone comes to the conclusion that life is not only about pure raw power but mostly about smooth sailing and general pleasant experience. Mac offers that peace and lets you enjoy life outside the working hours unlike PC which makes you want to surrender to the horizontal position on your bed until the next round of uphill battle. Maybe I’m jaded after 3 decades with multiple PC workstations but I know that every time I owned a Mac my life got brighter and I enjoyed my time spent with the computer and often felt inspired to create. To me this is priceless. I’m getting maxed out m3 Max MBP 16 next month. It’s been too long. BTW, great review👍

Great job on this review. This was very helpful.

Great video! Thanks for answering the questions we all had.

The exact same review video I was looking for…thanks for giving your genuine review and opinion 👏🏾

Best review I’ve watched. To the point and without hyperbole - really refreshing. Subscribed!

What a great review! thanks for sharing, waiting for my 16' M3 I ordered and posting my PC for sale. You getting a new subscriber here, thanks again.

good video, this tip at the end helped me decide once and for all, thank you

This was a great video. It was exactly what I was looking for. I just bought the m3 max too and I love it. In most of my use cases, it’s working great with the occasional hiccups. However, the Mac user experience is way better imo. I was on Mac and had to switch to pc a few years back just because i couldn’t afford a Mac upgrade. Recently I just went for it with the m3 max and I love that I can pull it out and work unplugged anywhere on battery and it’s so quiet! Also, I love the little things, like simply being able to airdrop some clips and exports to my phone for immediate render reviews. I could go on, but I’m just repeating what you’ve already said.

Thank you for this! A great breakdown of everything that is relevant to me. I am hoping the studio can come out soon with the M3 Max chip.

amazing video man ! Thank you

Has somebody who has watched countless hours of videos on Mac computers, I am incredibly grateful that you did this video because this is the exact performance metric that I am trying to find out. I have a 14700k, 128gb ran, 3080 pc and I've been curious about the real world playback in comparison so thank you for this great video

A review with no BS. Subscribed

Thanks for your response. I have been waiting to try resolve but my old Intel Mac is not compatible so I look forward to trying it I have watched many tutorials and do have a pretty good grasp on it but not the same until you actually use it. I will try the free version for a bit before I take the plunge but I can see myself going for it. Again awesome video I have subscribed and givin this one a thumbs up and look forward to more of your content. My hats off to you from Ontario Canada!

This was a great presentation - you could have presented anything and I would have watched. Good job!

Thanks for the video, great info.

Great review. I want to compliment your review style. I got used to a lot of reviewers emulating Marques Brownlee, but your style felt unique and overall well executed. Good stuff

You are just too good. The review is exactly what not only I but a lot of other people were looking for. And the quality is top notch. I hope and pray you grow a lot on YT so we can get better content. also I am pulling the trigger on MBP M3 Max after this video

Great video 💯😮

Wow Great video. Really enjoyed you take on things. Same as mine. I am brand new to Mac as a pro content creator. PC for 3 decades. Was blind but now I see. I use Adobe mostly and grade often in Resolve. I posted this below the other day. I only want to help. VIDEO EDITORS READ THIS: After buying 3 windows laptops in the last 6 months for video editing I landed on MacBook pro max with 48GB ram and 1TB. I bought the $4000 dollar Dell precision which I returned as it was a dog and riddled with problems. Then I bought 2 Lenovo's both loaded with 64gb of ram, one with the RTX4080 and one with the RTX4090. Sent them both back. I thought if I'm going to spend this kind of doe, I better be in video editing heaven. It was far from it, heartbroken and in disbelief. No way I thought I am giving up. I'm going to try one more time and I ordered a Mac M2 pro max refurbished. I never wanted to learned a new system (is was easy), but I thought what the hell, give it a try. It was the best decision I ever made as using this MacBook was indeed editing heaven. NIGHT and DAY. I was so blown away I ordered the M3 max and I had them both together for 2 weeks. I was a madman studying and testing. The M2 had 64GB of Ram as opposed to the M3 with 48GB. Performance wise I found the M2 to do very well and similar to the M3 performance. Both kicking butt. I ended up sending the M2 back and there is no comparison to windows in my experience to windows laptops. The very top of the line windows laptop cannot even sit in the same room as a MacBook Pro max. I am very experienced and took the time for a decade or more trying to find the ultimate editing station. For video editing (I never game) If you hear RU-vidrs trying to say differently, they are BS ing and most likely self serving. I am far far from a Mac fan boy. Just telling you the experience I had. I took all this time to write this to help some poor Bast__d like me avoid the 6 month nightmare I endured. But in the end I won. :)

I switched to MacBooks years ago, used to use a PC for video editing, Macs didn't have the horsepower 10 years ago. Ever since M1, I've been using MacBook Pros for video editing. I'm on M3 Pro now and my rig has been outfitted with 36GB of RAM. I had the M1 Pro, I ran into problems editing 4K60 on that, the problem came down to not having enough RAM, I had 16GB of RAM.

I have a friend that got a ProArt laptop. I can hear his fans from 2 cubicles away. Its feature rich and has everything you could put in a laptop. But it will not last. The fan noise alone will drive me crazy. You get more "stuff" on the PC side. But at least for me. It's never mattered. What matters to me is that it works well and is reliable. Quiet and can run at full tilt on battery. My older intel Macbook couldn't do that well at all. Either in fact. The M chips are fantastic. You get all of its power even on battery. You can take it to a client and not plug it in to do your work. And like you said, you can live a dongle free life (more money of course). But, its clean and profesional. That's worth the money. I'm on an M2 Max (one month before M3 came out). And I'm perfectly happy with it. Thanks for the video.

11:30 How long do you wait usually when Windows tells you that a program is non-responsive? I'm asking because SolidWorks sometimes can take 5-15minutes(Yes, that much, had 50 minute long save too at ~50k components) to do something. The program didn't crash, it's just that Windows is asking it to report progress but the program is too busy doing a certain task that makes it unresponsive... What I'm trying to ask/say is: Are you sure DaVinci isn't just taking too long to do something? Are you sure that it is crashed? From the B-roll you inserted it seems like it just hangs, not that it crashed...

14:25 You mention all day battery life? I returned my base 14 inch m3 pro macbook pro (18/512) but when using it I had to charge it 3 times a day while working at my desk. I may have been getting good battery life with like safari web browsing but with either resolve or lightroom open, even in the background I'd get like 3-5 hours battery life which is still impressive compared to powerful windows laptops but that's not all day by any means. How much battery life are you getting when working in resolve?

Thanks for this video, finally someone who focuses on Resolve and the M3Max. I‘m in a similar situation, my PC has similar specs but I want to go back to Mac and have the portability + advantage of ProRes rendering and so on… How much Ram would you suggest for Color Grading? Did you notice any heat or fan noise when pushing it to the limits? (I also do a lot of audio recording and this is important to me). Thank you

Спасибо, интересно. Вопрос: вижу, что вы используете мышь. Я сейчас монтирую на трекпаде. Если у вас есть опыт работы в давинчи на трекпаде, как бы вы оценили работу с мышью? Рекомендовали бы перейти на мышь?

Hi, nice video! I wanna ask how fast the speed warp is. I use speed warp to create slow motion a lot. I have M1 Max Macbook pro 16, rtx3090, rtx4090 and I would say both rtx card wipe the floor with M1 Max in speed warp, like 3days and 3hours difference. I'm curious about the speed on M3 Max.

Very nice video! I am considering the switch from a 2020 iMac 27" 72 GB Ram, 8-core i7, AMD Radeon 5700 XT 16 GB to the MacBook Pro for my Resolve/Adobe post-production. I'm considering van life and the iMac isn't exactly road-friendly. Your video was exactly what I needed to see. Thank you!

What were your tracking speeds with magic mask on the PC? They are like 4-7 fps for me on M1 Max

This What i Needs

I am your 1000. subscriber

Are you using studio or game ready drivers on your gpu?

The crashing stuff is definitely gonna piss me off especially when you into your project. Great review

Nice one. Thanks for not solely doing render tests. I render on break or when I sleep. I sit on the timeline all day long. I am a little disappointed that it can't handle NR and grain and play back in real time. I'm using a Mac Pro 5,1 (vega 56, 48gb ram, NVME) and while the performance on the M3 Max appears a little better, I can run 7fps or so on my machine with similar effects. Although I am using braw - not sure how big a difference would be there... Also, as both PC and Mac user mac OS and general stability is FAR FAR better, though you sacrifice upgradability. I keep lusting after a powerful Mac laptop (as I hate being completely strapped to the desk) and every time Apple releases a new chip I get excited, then I see the timeline performance and think... meh,. Feels like my expectations should be realistic, using a 15 year old 5,1. Like you say in the video 'what a time to be alive' - indeed - but maybe tech is plateauing in terms of usability. Though I do wonder if Blackmagic will be optimising Resolve for Apple silicone more?

Great video! I'm a windows user and thought that davinci resolve didnt run to smooth on my machine. Now looking at your PC specs I know its not me its Resolve. I am looking to buy the m2 or m3 max. Do you think thres a big difference between m2 and m3 max?

Было бы также интересно увидеть видео о том как вы справляетесь с проблемой гамма шифта на мак. Возможно, в рамках темы колор менаджмента давинчи

Well for a guy that is not a tech reviewer. I do say this is the best approach to a topic that I have investigated heavily as I am in the market to purchase this laptop to start my channel and learn to code. I think this review as assured my thoughts in the purchase of a M3 max. I have one question and why Davince Resolve and not Final Cut Pro since you are using the Mac. I know a lot of creators have switched to Davince but I’m curious on your thoughts.

I've been actively avoiding using DR on Windows ever since voice isolation was introduced to DR, because using this feature on Windows used to cause significant lag to the audio and it was impossible to edit. I wish I could justify a Mac but I can't. So I run DR on Linux full time now. It's even faster to render on Linux than on WIndows, and most importantly, it almost never crashed.

To each his own, I'm back with Windows and have no regrets. At the beginning of my experience on the pre-built PC that I bought almost three years ago now, I did experience Davinci Resolve crashes that led to such system corruption that I couldn't restore and had to do a fresh install. I went completely basic with the drivers and installed no motherboard drivers, only Nvidia Studio drivers and I never had a problem again since then no matter how hard I pushed the editing and effects. I would suggest that anyone having crashes try the same.

You're correct to flag the PC performance reliability for Resolve. I work in a post production facility in London, and we only trust MAC and Linux for Resolve, we've also had such conversation with BlackMagic reps who visted the facilitys and also recommended Mac/Linux

That is some great & objective review form your own perspective and real life experience. I particularly liked the jab on the "fan boy" Apple people that I find completely insufferable when I hear them yapping and yapping about their veneration for Apple...

I dread days when i have to go and grade in a facilty working on pc's. I have a 2021 Max 1 MBP 64gb Ram 8gb Graphics card in my own studio and it's bulletproof running Resolve. I've had 1 Resolve crash this year and that was using Magic Mask on multiple nodes and only because i was being impatient and doing 2 fuctions at once. A mac is simply way easier to work with whereas a pc is just so painfully confusing and clunky. Honestly my set up performs way way better than any pc set up i've ever used and i've used some that were crazy money because of graphics cards. My machine cache's complete 4k timelines in a few minutes, knocks out renders super quickly and never lags / freezes etc. Looking at all the tests the improvements of the M3 Max v M1 Max your best option is to buy a 2nd hand M1 Max fully loaded which you can on ebay for around £2k. I've been a colourist 20+ years so know a good set up from a bad, the corrections have to be instant as does the respone when hitting play. A pc is like grading sitting on one hand and of course you can't render prores. PC, constant faffing about with drivers etc v mac that does it all in the background for you. I've no interest in being a pc nerd, i'm a colourist a prefer spending my time colouring not tinkering with the machine. Like an iphone it's just much better than an android and the only people that will tell you otherwise are tinkerers who just can't accept the truth.

in our office we use resolve on 5 different pc's. we transfer close to 30TB of raw data in each movie. we do color correction for motion pictures. we do commercial editing. there has never been the slightest freeze in any of them for 3 years. We also have Apple computers, but we do not prefer the M chip for rendering, because they are very slow in rendering compared to the PC. we use them on set for DIT. moreover, I must say that the mac froze several times during transfers and even corrupted the addressing table (exfat) of a Lacie (2big 28tb thunderbolt4) disk. mac was frozen and we couldn't disconnect the drive. after hardrestart, we lost the drive.

I'm glad that my $1100 pc performs better 😁

Magic Mask and other FX are GPU oriented so PC are generally better (depending on the card). But stability and OS is so much better with macs!

The M3Max GPUs are much better than M1-2 MAx for Resolve since it's GPU accelerated. However, encoder engines are the same so the encoding time would be same if you use Handbrake. If your apps don't use much GPU, hardware raytracing, then M1max , M2max are fine. I did notice some apps are not optimized for M3Max yet so it would be better over time. Some users won't see a big difference if their apps don't take advantage of the hardware. Eg. Audio editing, Photo editing. Blender 3d is really good on M3Max 40 GPU. It's almost as fast as my desktop 3090.

Спасибо!

My 12-core Threadripper with GTX 4080 (59 neural engines) does not crash. I don't have games on it. It's cobbled together with refurbed top components that are very stable. 15 -minute drama (TimeCode synced sound) loaded with half dozen grading nodes and Fusion VFX renders 4K deliverable in 6 minutes. Winning world festivals since 2011.

more than 10 years working everyday Davinci (MacOs, Windows, Linux... ). I choose windows for "real" work.

I think H.264 is the least problem here. I only work with H.265 personally and it's the most demanding codec, especially 8K and 4K@120fps 4:2:2 10bit.

I don’t know any high end machines but just a base model MacBook Air with M2 and I am probably never going back to Windows. macOS is way more stable and clean, the ecosystem integration is good, portability, fast ports, good speakers and displays, best trackpad ever, good keyboard. That makes working with a laptop so much more enjoyable.

How does the davinci 1080p timeline 4k output work? Is the footage 1080p and you're just upscaling it? Or is this something you're doing to get better timeline performance? How is this different from working in a 4k timeline with 1/2 timeline playback resolution enabled? Also if you're editing 4k in a 1080p timeline, when exporting to 4k are we sure we get the original 4k pixels or is it upscaling a downscaled 4k back to 4k?

Why did you not buy an M2 Ultra? Seems like it should outperform the M3 Max no? And the external display is necessary anyway for your job no?

What configuration do you have on PC?

Ain't no windows fanboy nor Mac. And if I had the money I would probably bye and Mac book with the proper specs. Portability would be nice. However I do wonder about your drivers. I'm running a very similar PC system and resolve almost never crashes. I use lots of effects crazy timelines color grades, all that. As for magic mask. It has problems. However it does work well just slower than I would like and sometimes I have to redo it. And when I'm really going crazy with magic mask an denoising I'll put it in its own timeline and do what I need to with that clip render it out in DNXhr. Then put it back in the project. Not ideal but it works. Anyway just saying. Enjoy your videos great stuff.

I have the M1 Pro 16" and a RTX 4070 Gaming rig I use only the MacBook for productivity task cos of the reliability even though the desktop is faster

Totally agreed, the default windows 11 with all the low resolution deep fried jpegs 'news' articles and such everywhere is so nasty.

Слушай, я сейчас жду GPU, 14600k+4070Super конфиг ПК. Есть ли смысл позже докупить 16' M3 Max базовый на 30C? Сейчас у меня 14'' на M1 Pro - совсем не вывозит Диван :) Вот я кстати наоборот юзаю маски, титры, и т.п. Круто снимаешь и круто показываешь именно работу в самой монтажке, видеоряд с набитой рукой отснят - продолжай дальше

Your timeline switching on the windows machine is bizarre. Takes something like 2-5 seconds depending on footage. 3090, 5090x, 32GB ram, NVME OS and NVME separate Resolve DB

You can spend 5000 USD on a Macbook Pro with M3 Max and some extra ram or ssd. For that kind of money, you can get a monster Windows PC that is much faster than Mac, for gaming, video editing, and 3D Modeling with Blender or Maya. Most professional editors are using Avid, Premiere Pro, or Davinci Resolve. And all of those run superbly on a 24-core Ryzen processor with NVidia RTX 4090. Windows PC is truly the Ferrari in this comparison.

Granted with apple you have to spend $/£5000 cause you need the ram and storage unless you're web browsing. I had a base m3 pro macbook pro (18/512) on which resolve was crashing multiple times daily, and both resolve and lightroom were becoming laggy due to ram starvation. (18 is a joke for professional applications)

I wonder why people compare low spec pc with high-end spec macbook pro? please compare same priced hardware performances bro :D

Are we considering RTX 3080 PC with 64gig of ram , mid range ?💀

edit 🤯

Welcome to the macOS world. Just love macOS just because of the reliability and stability

4:20 Honestly, lugging around a 16-inch MacBook Pro should not be a big deal for a man, especially when you're used to carrying a 7 to 8kg backpack to the office every day. The key is to have a good quality backpack with thick, comfy, soft shoulder pad. I've been rocking this beast since 2019 and recently get the M3 Pro 16", and it's been a game-changer. Sure, most of my work happens at home, hooked up to a massive 38-inch monitor, but that's just part of the story. When I'm out and about, maybe chilling at a coffee shop or getting some quiet time in the library, the 16-inch screen is a total lifesaver. Juggling multiple windows? No sweat. And let's not forget the battery life - it's a knockout, way better than the 14-inch model. So, yeah, it's a little bit hefty, but totally worth it for the muscle it brings to my workflow. And hey, before anyone points out the whole ‘A 16” MacBook Pro is too big for an economy class tray table' thing - I totally get it. But here's the kicker: I don't use my MBP and keep it safe in my backpack. When I'm jet-setting, it's all about kicking back - no work, all play. I switch gears to my iPad Pro, plug into my Bose ANC headset, and dive into some action movies. So, yeah, the 16-inch Mac is a bit of a unit, but for everything it brings to the table, it's a no-brainer for me. 🤣

meanwhile, my 1400$ 2021 Asus g15 with 2tb ssd/rtx 3070 and 16gb of ram pretty much performs the same.

it is hard to admit it, but if youre working on digital media you better buy a mac.

Please don't buy MACs if you don't have very high income, you will be crying with that low storage and RAM, for professional work with heavy graphics design or vfx you need max storage and max ram, working with external ssd is not an option trust me I have used, get a maxed PC at 1/3 of price of maxed out MAC.

Is that woman an actress?

U are coming for killing point ❤️‍🩹🔥