M4 ($599) Vs M4 Pro ($1399) in DaVinci Resolve Studio - Don't WASTE your money!

in my previous video we tested to see if the base model Mac Mini is any good at editing when using the free version of denture resolve and it was definitely watch that video first if you want to see the general timeline performance of these Mac minis but a lot of you had questions is it good enough for the Vint resolve studio and how does it compare to the M4 pro version of the Mac Mini well I've got one of those here so we're going to do a bit of a comparison and see how they both perform in the Venture resolve Studio Plus I've thrown in my own M3 MacBook Pro just for a bit of a comparison as well so I've set up a few demonstrations just to give you a rough idea of how all of this thing works and we're going to do some render kind of timelines as well so you've got some direct numbers to compare so let's jump into the Vint resolve and start off with a nice simple comparison Oh and before I forget all of the live demonstration stuff is being recorded on the Bas model M4 so let's open and resolve and get into it and it is this it's an 8 minute Vlog all of this footage right here is 264 10bit 422 25 and it's 4K the timeline is 4K we're not using any Proxes and let's just make sure the playback is set to full resolution and generally the timeline performance for this is really quite nice it's quite a simple project we haven't done too much we've just cut things up there's no color grading cuz I actually shot it with a Lut kind of baked in we are using a small amount of Studio features because I have this nice track here but I wanted to get rid of the vocals so this has no voice so we're using the music remixer and anyone that's ever used the music remixer it can start to chug things up a little bit but this is working really quite nicely now there's a tiny amount of delay when moving the playhead like the tiniest amount but that is being caused by this if we delete that it's actually much much snappier and we can come in we can delete things and it's still quite nice if we under all of that it is still is pretty Snappy it's just a tiny tiny difference but it's it's pretty solid and the performance on the pro is not noticeably better to be honest they they're pretty much identical in that regard now I ran off some exports of this project the M4 the base model did that project in 2 minutes and 11 seconds the M4 Pro 2 minutes and 6 seconds and the M3 MacBook Pro 2 minutes and 29 seconds so all of them were basically identical now as mentioned there's not a huge amount going on in that one but it's still an 8 minute 4K project with some decent footage and a little bit of AI stuff going on so that's not too bad now just sticking in this project for a second let me just give you another quick demonstration of some of the AI based audio stuff so on this timeline here we've got audio one this has got on my vocals let's just go and enable the dialogue separator which allows you to knock down the background and the Ambi I and bring up the voices and mute different things and this historically has caused a bit of delay so let's just see how that plays so long story short yeah this there's a tiny pause now when you move your playhead as it's kind of rethinking but we still getting 25 frames we can still move around this timeline pretty quickly we can start to Ripple delete things and it will close those gaps without too much of an issue slight delay but nothing too major get and it's not doing too bad of a job in a lot of these areas we do have the music remixer on and of course now we have that dialogue separator over the entire track if we were to select some audio here as well and then let's turn on the voice isolation as well so we've got all three going on hit play it's still doing 25 there's that tiny pause as we move our play head but overall still pretty solid and he's doing the exact same thing on the M4 pro version and it's pretty much the same all of these devices the M4 line they all actually have the same size noral engine it's a 16 core noral engine so a lot of these kind of AI based effects which use those noral engine stuff will probably be very similar there may be some slight differences but it's mostly going to be down to kind of the CPU and the GPU rather than the noral engine itself cuz they're all the same right let's open a slightly bigger project this is my Dent resolve 19. 1 update video and once again everything's 4K I've got some 4K screen capture stuff and my main footage is 4K once again it's all 264 10 bit 422 30 4K yada yada yada no proes nothing else going on there and this project I actually edited and cut and published on that base model M4 and again really Snappy I had no issues putting this together it's really quite good it doesn't use a huge amount of Studio only effects once again there's a tiny bit of magic mask going on at the beginning now the reason we're looking at this project though is because I used Lots oh that fell down so the reason we're looking at this project though is because it does have a lot of titles going on so this bit here for example we've got this new generator fusion generator going on and we've also got some nice titles by motion VFX now this does run it will get through but you'll get about double the FPS running this on the M4 Mac Pro so the pro is faster when it starts to do this kind of fusion stuff and there's quite a lot of that over this timeline so this is about a 20-minute timeline the M4 base model did this in 17 minutes and 18 seconds the M4 pro model did this in 10 minutes and 22 seconds so 7 minutes faster but it still got through it it just meant you had to wait an extra 7 minutes so so a lot of this video is going to be me saying it really depends how important that is to you because how important is that 7 minutes to you me I mean that's up for you to decide really something else I'm going to say a lot in this video is this if we go to playback timeline playback resolution just change this to half now this doesn't generate any proxies it just lowers the resolution of this preview and then if we hit play we get much faster FPS it almost plays at real time it kind of Skips a few but it's not too bad at all and if you do that on both they both almost have real time playback and there's a very very little difference between the actual timeline performance again between the M4 and the M4 Pro when you render you'll still have that 7 Minute difference but on the actual editing side of things on the timeline yeah not much in it really right now before we jump into the next one I just need to let you know that this video sponsor motion V effect having a sitewide 30% off sale but it's for a limited time only this is only available up to the 4th of December all of the fusion titles you've seen in any of these demo projects are of course from motion VFX and all of the split screens graphs Transitions and titles in this very video are also from motion V effect and they've got a wide range of plugins available for denture resolve like this m presentation plugin which which contains everything you need to create top quality presentations in no time or if you're into the clean Apple aesthetic why not check out the M Keynotes plug-in which contains over 100 simple essential assets to check out the range of motion VFX plugins for dent resolve simply click on that link down in the description below and then to get that 30% off just use the code bw30 at checkout bw30 30% off you've got until the 4th of December job done right let's crack on now sticking with titles and fusion stuff Fusion does start to step ahead now I downloaded the fusion spaceship example you can actually get from Blackmagic I didn't know this existed until someone tagged me on Twitter and this is an entire project so you have to run this in the Standalone version of fusion rather than within Fusion within D Vin resolve itself but it's a good indicator just to show you how Fusion works on these different devices it also uses very very little memory I checked this it was only using a couple of gigs worth of ram unified memory so that isn't a limiting factor in this test the M4 base model came out at 45 minutes and 50 seconds the M4 Pro 27 minutes and 28 seconds the M3 MacBook 50 minutes and 45 seconds obviously that's over a big extended render if it's just a few titles on the timeline you're not going to notice that much of a difference right now let's jump into some of the individual smaller sort of Studio only effects I've set up a really simple timeline we're just going to apply some of these effects and see how they play back in real time now the footage I've used for this is just standard 4K stuff I found on the internet now the reason I'm doing that is so you can download it for yourself so in the description below there are a handful of links to all the footage I'm about to use for this real- time demonstration so if you've got shudio installed you can create your own timeline that looks very similar to this and apply the same effects and do some comparisons for yourself we're going to kick things off with magic masks so we've got this simple footage here it is 4K don't know what the codec is H 264 something or other 4K yada yada yada we are not using any proxies and just to make sure let's put this back to four that's good to go now if we jump onto the color page we're just going to jump straight down to the magic masks no messing around give this a bit of a squiggle we're going to keep it on faster just get a bit easier put the overlay on that's picked that up already and we're going to track and we'll see what this gets and so far after a couple of seconds we're getting about 9 FPS it jumps sometimes it drops to eight then it sits at 9 maybe it'll hit 10 in a second then it comes back to 9 but it seems to kind of average out at about 9 FPS running the same thing on the M4 Pro does generally net you a few additional frames not many but a couple now once that's done let's just toggle that off and we'll give it something really silly once that is done if we jump back onto the edit page it will play back nicely in real time so once the tracking's done you can still then come in here and it'll all delete and you know you can do all the stuff playback is pretty solid next up we've got this footage here and we want to den noise it now using the noise reduction is very very heavy and that does prove the case when trying to do it on the M4 so we've got this footage here we're going to jump into the noise reduction we'll do one frame faster we do 10 10 and 10 and hit play and it's going to struggle it's going to drop frames noise reduction as mentioned is very very difficult to do in the Vintage resolve it always needs lots of horsepower and this base model M4 just doesn't quite cut it now the M4 Pro does fair better we can get one frame in real time we can go all the way up to three frames and still get real time but then when we go to Five Fram frames we end up at about 20 FPS so we do then start to lose some frames but it is better than the base model M4 the same thing applies if you're using the spatial noise reduction as well this is all just a little bit heavy for the GPU within this base model M4 and it does start to stretch the pro version as well but once again like I mentioned previously there is kind of a solution so if this was me let's let's let's leave it on five why not I would zoom in this is not a great example because this footage is not very good it's all compressed and horrible but I wanted so you could download it as well and let's say that we tweaked this just a small amount and we said yes we're happy with this but obviously we only get a few frames per second but we've done all this at the full resolution of the playback we're happy with it we can then just come down and go right half and now we're back up to 25 frames we're back into real time and we go to the edit page we can wiggle around and this plays back absolutely fine we can copy we can cut we can do all sorts of stuff and it's good to go so when you're trying to preview it back at the full resolution it really drops the frames you can then set it and change it to half and then play back and it's not too bad so again that kind of comes down to you and how much of a priority that sort of thing is there's a very quick and easy solution to get it to playb so you can cut things together nicely on the timeline just bear in mind when you do render that it is going to be at that less than real time frame rates so it's going to be considerably slower super scaling is very very similar so this is the 2x enhanced and we're getting about six frames this is at the full resolution we can go to 2X and we get real time if we go to 3x we're back up to real time and if we go to 4X these are the non-enhanced versions we drop frames it says 25 but it looks slightly janky I think it's dropping a couple even though it says 25 well you know it's close now the M4 Pro does fair a little bit better the standard 2 and three are absolutely fine in real time four is pretty good it's very very close again it looks slightly choer even though it's saying it's real time and the 2x enhanced drops us to about 11 FPS onto the film look Creator just dropping that on there leaving it as the default 65 mil hit play and we're going to drop some frames so this is running about 10 FPS it says it's caught up to 25 if we go to the color page we usually get a more accurate reading yeah it's not we're running at about 12ish f PS on the M4 Pro I'll do a little side by side here you can see it is quicker but it's still not real time in this example now a lot of this is simply caused by the grain we toggle that off we will get more frames still not real time oh it's having a think close to real time but not quite and then halation we disable that and we'll back up to real time so you can use everything with the exception of those two those two start to kind of trip it up and that's when you start to lose some frame whereas on the M4 Pro once youve disabled grain you do jump back up to the real time playback but of course on either you could change that playback resolution to half once again and get real time on both and last but not least speed warp so this clip here has been slowed down to 20 and it's got Optical flow on there at the moment and that will play back with no issues if we go to the motion estimation speed warp faster hit play and we're going to drop a lot of frames so we're only going to be sitting at a couple two 2. 53 is FPS on that one the M4 Pro not much better it's double so technically it is better but it's still only 4 FPS now changing this to be speed warp better which is better but it's obviously considerably harder to run we hit play on this one and we're going to be sitting one one and a half two FPS on that one once again the M4 Pro being twice as fast but still only getting us about two or three frames now all of those especially the D super scale the speed warps that sort of thing are super GPU heavy it was only kind of recently with the 40 series and when D Vinci resolve got a little bit faster that you could do a lot of those things in real time with a big fat chunky powerful GPU and the Mac Mini is about the same size as a side salad so there you go but anyway that's using those sorts of things over really short clips let's give you a real world example as well so this is one of the videos I created for my YouTube channel there's quite a bit of effects there's quite a bit of fusion going on in here we do lots of sort of cutaways with backgrounds and popins and arrows and titles and all that sort of stuff but there's two versions of this so what I quite often like to do is to apply a bit of halation to my videos just to make my sign and my lights kind of pop so this version doesn't have the halation enabled oras this version does and as you would imagine we struggle to get realtime playback the solution when a f was editing this would be to set it to half and then it would be absolutely fine but that is going to have an impact when it comes to the render times and indeed it does with the halation enabled the M4 mini jumps up another 10 minutes that took 25 minutes and 3 seconds the M4 Pro 14 minutes and 1 second and the M3 MacBook Pro 19 minutes and 26 seconds Right Moving On Let's Talk subtitles and transcriptions so we're back on this big long 19.

1 one video and we're simply going to go to timeline create subtitles from audio we'll leave those as they are and hit create it's going to blast through this timeline and create us some subtitles and this is going to create these at about 12 and 1 half I got about 12. 5 12. 7 is times real speed so it's going to do this 20 minute timeline in just over a minute about a minute and a half is the M4 Pro marginally quicker but kind of within margin of error to be hon 13 times so a teeny bit quicker and the M3 MacBook Pro slower at about 10 10.

7 now running the transcriptions this is quite a long clip here let's just go to the transcriptions clear it to make sure it's not already there and we will transcribe this now the transcriptions usually a little bit quicker than the subtitles and I've got about 14. 5 at this minute it generally kind of jumps up a little bit in the tests I've done I averaged it out at about 14 14. 9 somewhere between 14 and 15 times real speed the M4 Pro again just slightly quicker I got that about 15.

5 to 16ish and the M3 MacBook Pro 13.