Pro Colorist’s Take on Apple’s New MacBook Pro M1 Max

What’s going on everyone! Welcome back to another epic video. Today we are going to be going over a professional colorist's take on the new MacBook Pro M1 Max from Apple. Just so you know, this has been spec’d out fully, except for the hard drive. I went with the 4TB SSD.

        Now before I get into this, I want to talk about the machine I was using before and why I decided to switch. About a year ago I switched to the fully spec’d out 27” iMac on the Intel processor. However it wasn’t enough of a jump to justify sticking with this machine, so I ended up going the custom built PC route. All in my PC cost about $4500, but that was an inflated price because we were in that GPU shortage where prices skyrocketed. I built this to hold me over until Apple made their launch into more of the prosumer machines. That’s when this M1 Max came out.

        Apple isn’t considered the “high performance” king, but there is something to note about having all of your devices tied to one machine. This Apple ecosystem makes it easy to transfer files, notes, or even connect with people. This is the reason why I wanted to switch back to Apple since building the PC. The PC has been great, but this is not a direct comparison.

        Now with these tests, the goal is to see if I can get the performance needed to leave the PC. I have specific performance goals in mind that it needs to hit for me to leave the PC world for this. The question for today is: will this MacBook Pro replace my current machine until Apple releases the M1X or M2 chip in their Mac Pro?

        I will be focusing on the most important stuff when it comes to us as colorists. We will be looking at how it handles noise reduction, several OFX tools, and then also how it performs on different codecs and all them mixed. Then also how render times are and playback speeds. So here are my expectations:

For noise reduction:

For most codecs this is very suitable. For most codecs you don’t need that full speed playback with noise reduction. It’s nice to have but if you need to do any render caching, it’s not a big deal.

        For heavy OFX:

I use a lot of OFX in my grades, from CST to plugins. It is really important that it can play this back without hiccups.

        For render speeds:

I want to see how it sustains the renders throughout each timeline.

        Without further ado, let’s get into this. I am leaving out some OFX, but I wanted to make this more of a real world test on my day to day workflow. Starting off we are going to begin with our ProRes clips.

That is the basic node tree that is similar among all clips. We do have a timeline node with film grain. We are going to start these with noise reduction turned off. When we first hit play, we can see that it’s playing back at full speed.

You can even see when I press the spacebar it plays right away.

        Now moving to our RED timeline, we can see the same thing as with ProRes. Everything plays back smoothly. There is no delay when we hit the spacebar too. One thing to note is that when we add film grain to the timeline, the dot next to our frame rate is red, meaning it might have dropped a frame or two.

But it changes back to green after a bit.

One thing I want to do is push it as far as it’ll go and see what it takes to get it back to full speed.

It is a bit slower in starting to play in RED, but it’s still almost immediate.

        Now moving to what I think will be the worst, H.265 from the GroPro. Again, it does playback in full. No issue at all. It’s almost immediate when I hit the space bar too.

        That answers the question without noise reduction. You can easily playback footage with simple OFX on the clips.

        Now we are going to turn on noise reduction across the board. Here are our settings for the noise reduction.

So moving back to our ProRes timeline, we can see that when we hit the spacebar we are at about 17-18 fps.

This could work if you are trying to get an idea of what the footage will look like. It’s not what I expected, but it’s close.

I am surprised that it’s not as high on ProRes, which is more suitable for this machine to run.

        Now jumping into the RED footage, it drops down even more to about 14-15 fps of playback.

So it is a bit lower than I’d expected and hoped. It is jumpy and responsive, but it does hit playback. When you change this to a 4K timeline, it drops that playback even more.

However I am always running a 1080p timeline since my reference monitor is only 1080p.

        Now moving to the GoPro footage, we are actually sitting higher than either of the previous tests at around 18-19 fps.

That’s very doable to grade a project and really get to see what the footage will look like.

        Just to recap, here is what we get from each:

All in all I am pretty impressed with how this is doing. Obviously full speed playback would be great, but this is fine for what I do.

        Now I am going to add in a more complex node tree using one of my 16mm power grades.

Now this plays back at about 15-17 fps. This slows the machine down quite a bit and it even takes a second or two to start playing back on this RED footage.

        Now that we have a pretty idea of what playback times are like, let’s move onto the render times. I’ve rendered out a total of 16 different timelines and I’m honestly pretty impressed with the results overall. Here is a graphic with all the numbers.

These are all 1080p timelines and renders. So expect to see a drop if you are going up to 4K.

        Before I get to my final verdict, there are a couple other things I wanted to mention. When it comes to scene cut detection, it was a lot slower on the PC for some reason. Another thing was opening projects. It’s a lot faster on this machine. And then switching projects was also faster. Now one thing to note, all of these tests are done with three monitors (two in 4K) and all my peripherals running through a thunderbolt dock. All of those suck more power, but it does not affect any performance. Another thing was when I put a bunch of GoPro clips onto a timeline and rendered it with a small minimal grade, it was rendering at 285 fps.

This is just a good thing to note.

        With all that said, the final verdict for whether this will be replacing my PC is….

        Yes it will. For a couple reasons. One is that it’s enough. It does the job well enough. It’s also a lot faster to transfer files. Uploading is also fast because of the 10 gb ethernet port and that I have fiber. The other things are just built in Apple tools like AirDrop and iMessage and reminders and notes. Having these sync between all of my devices, this all makes it best to switch back to the Mac.

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