BEST video editor for Mac M1? (FCP Vs Premiere 2021 Vs Resolve)

davinci resolve premiere final cut pro six different timelines compared four different types of footage all put head to head to see which editing software is the best optimized for the mac m1 some of the results will surprise you let's dive in [Music] hello everybody my name is guy pigdon i am the savage filmmaker i make feature films web series and shorts and i'm here to give tips and advice to indie filmmakers about how to make those things recently davinci resolve released a new update claiming to have made some dramatic optimizations for the mac m1 i did a video looking at the performance of blackmagic design's b raw footage with both my macbook m1 and my intel imac 2020 which you can watch here but what about the other editing programs premiere pro's most recent update also claims to be optimized for the mac m1 and yes final cut pro is the og of being optimized for m1 due to the fact that it's created by apple themselves so i'll be comparing timeline playback and export render times across all three editing platforms first let's talk about how i'm conducting these tests in my previous test the results using b-raw and the new resolve were quite underwhelming as someone pointed out in the comments perhaps mac m1 just doesn't like b-raw also famously final cut pro can't read b-roll footage natively you need to transcode it first which defeats the purpose of testing it so in this follow up i decided to use a wider range of different codecs all of which are natively readable by the three editing programs my first timeline is 4k red raw red code 36 clips shot on the red one this is slightly older lower bitrate red rock footage and thus easier for editing so for my second timeline i took two minutes worth of clips shot on the red gemini two clips filmed in five to one compression and the rest filmed in lower quality eight to one compression these are 5k clips downscaled to a uhd timeline the third timeline is the notoriously difficult canon c200 raw light using just under 1 minute and 20 seconds of this 4k 12 bit raw footage the fourth timeline is uhd 4k footage shot using the canon's mp4 codec this is a full export of one of my old youtube videos it also features some stills and iphone footage and it's 11 and a half minutes long the fifth timeline is canon c200 4k uhd xf avc using just under two minutes worth of clips taken from one of my old corporate shoots and the final timeline is just a minute's worth of 4k uhd upscaled 422 prores 10-bit footage shot on my canon 5d mark iii using magic lantern firmware it's important to note that clips in a timeline will not always represent real world use as typical edits feature much more involved color grading clip stacking and effects but because each editing software applies these effects differently applying them in these timelines would only lead to a less accurate comparison at the very least these tests can give us a good baseline of how the mac m1 responds to the different types of footage in each editing program it's also important to note i have turned off all optimization and additional proxy and transcoding options for both final cut and davinci resolve this means that each timeline is being played back without any cheating you're seeing how each program handles the original files without generating media to improve playback smoothness it's important to make this distinction as a lot of the time this is done automatically in the background to improve timeline performance each timeline was set to uhd 4k 3840 by 2160 for these tests i am using my 13 inch macbook pro with the new m1 8 core cpu and gpu with 16 gigs of ram for all tests i've also tested each timeline with my imac 2020 with an intel i7 8 core processor with 64 gigs of ram and the upgraded 5700 xt 16 gig graphics card so stick around for those additional results at the end first let's look at playback quality on the bps3 timelines featuring raw files all right so first test with the mac m1 and i've just got it set up here next to me and this is red code 36 read code raw from the red one so it's older red and we're just gonna see how that plays back this is just has a basic lut applied so having a little look here so maybe dropping a couple of frames here maybe but um overall looking pretty good definitely pretty smooth and this is a 4k uhd timeline so playing back pretty well definitely could use it to edit for sure all right so we've switched over to adobe premiere pro uh 15.4.1 here let's put on show drop frames now let's have a little look and see how it's playing so this is at full quality okay yep dropping frames like crazy okay yeah just struggling along so let's drop it down to half quality and play again just looking smoother now so we're getting a better result now it's playing back pretty well now yeah so we're getting solid um playback at half quality okay so now we're moving on to final cut pro on the m1 if we look at our timeline here uh we have it to better quality we don't have any optimized media this is the original it's definitely a little bit laggy not quite playing back perfectly you can see it's very stuttery there so let's try better performance and now we're getting nice smooth playback okay so we've got our second red test here this is using red gemini footage it should be a little bit tougher and we've got some five to one clips first two clips of five to one and the rest i believe are eight to one so let's just see how the timeline plays so right off the bat it's not really playing and we're dropping a lot of frames here and it's really stuttering and struggling and if we look at this clip exactly the same issue so we did have similar problems even on the imac uh so this isn't really a big surprise but this is absolutely lagging and dropping frames which is completely unplayable that's the five to one footage there uh let's have a little look at the uh eight to one so again we're definitely seeing some lag some stuttering here it's not playing very smoothly at all so let's just try and we'll change the timeline and see if we have better luck once we put it down to 1920 okay looks like still struggling still dropping frames and yep still dropping frames so not really that usable all right so now we're on to our second red test let's just try and play the five two one at full quality and yep it's dropping a lot of frames very stuttery not really working barely playing absolutely barely playing if we move to the eight to one footage again still dropping a lot of frames so let's bring it down to [Music] half and try again and we're getting again still drop frames so now we're at a quarter and our playback is getting smoother much smoother now doesn't look like we're dropping too many frames now so that playback is better let's try this high quality footage at the beginning okay not too bad at quarter quality so we're getting pretty decent playback at a quarter quality for this red raw footage so that's again pretty impressive um and we've got some five to one footage at the start so we're gonna see if we can play that this is playing in the timeline and it's not looking oh okay that's yeah okay no it's not looking too good at all now and we can see it's very sort of jittery and jumpy it's not paying back smoothly at all so still struggling here so that that's five to one let's try the eight to one and yeah that's still not looking smooth so let's try if we play that bit of performance now okay let's see how this goes certainly scrubs through very quickly so let's try this good footage again and it does look like it's playing back much smoother now yeah so that's looking pretty good and this footage now is playing back very smoothly so now that we've brought that performance down it's actually playing like butter which is really impressive okay so we've got uh canon c200 raw light footage here in our timeline and we are in a 4k timeline still so first of all we're just going to test playback see if it can play back here and right away we are dropping a lot of frames it's definitely struggling a little bit let's just play a bit more it's catching back up a little bit now but it's definitely a little bit stuttery and jerky so much smoother now i would say that's definitely editable now so if you have raw light in a 1920 by 1080 timeline i think you could probably edit that on the m1 okay playback right off the bat we are dropping frames it's very jerky and stuttery so let's drop it down to half and let's see how the timeline is going now okay this is promising so we're getting reasonable playback but we are dropping frames again so let's go to quarter okay now things are getting a bit smoother okay and looks like at a quarter quality playback is smooth and so i'm going to put this back to better quality and we're going to see how it plays and better quality so let's just have a little look here okay we are seeing it um be a little bit stuttery it's definitely not playing smoothly at all you can see it just breaking up and it's coming right now but it's definitely breaking up a little bit here but if we change this to better performance and now let's try now we're getting very smooth playback when we have it better performance but we also get it playing back in a much sort of lower resolution so we're getting smooth playback when we change it to better performance if we look at playback results we can see that all three programs struggled with gemini footage especially the higher quality clips which is no surprise in both red timelines final cut seem to perform the best on playback when adjusting the quality to the lower setting resolve performed very well with the redcode 36 but really struggled with the gemini footage while premiere had good timeline playback at a quarter resolution which is surprising playback has definitely improved across the board it was impressive to see how well both resolve and final cut pro now deals with playing back canon raw light files which is a notoriously difficult codec for editing software premiere seemed to struggle more but this becomes more obvious when factoring in export times however i really want to reiterate that these are just a series of clips in a timeline not a proper edit and i think a lot of the good performances seen here would quickly fall apart as these timelines got busier and more layered and longer than a minute or two that leaves the three other timelines which i won't play through here due to the similarities in their results the mp4 and xf abc footage played back very well in all timelines but i thought the responsiveness and resolve was the best premiere did struggle slightly while playing back the mp4 c200 timeline which is ironic considering this is what i originally edited that video with the prores 422 timeline played flawlessly amongst all three programs but this is no surprise given that apple's prores is apple's own kodiak and these machines are built to utilize it overall in terms of playback experience final cut pro offered the most responsive timelines across all the different formats however it's unclear exactly what resolution fcp plays its footage in as you only have better quality or better performance neither of these indicate specifically what resolution it is playing the timeline in when you shift raw light footage to better performance for example the playback quality is incredibly low res and pixelated yes it plays back smoothly but that would be expected when it's playing in such low quality it's unclear what's going on under the hood when dealing with final cut and i found its lack of transparent options frustrating here this makes it hard to accurately judge against its two competitors when i say that it is the best for playback moving on to render times for exporting each timeline this is where things really start to get juicy it was neck and neck for the prores timeline all software performed well and blazed through this export premiere was surprisingly the fastest here but only by two seconds and all of these results are probably within margin of error sadly this was the only timeline where the new optimized version of premiere performed the best moving on to red footage we can see resolve outperforms both premiere and final cut pro here by a healthy margin especially when it comes to the higher quality gemini footage which is interesting considering how much it struggled to play that same footage smoothly looking at the c200 raw light timeline we can see that final cut pro rendered the fastest tier by considerable margin while premiere was lagging behind all software dealt with the xf-avc footage well and finished the exports in close to the same time this is a massive improvement from older versions of premiere and resolve as i could not play back this footage at all when i originally purchased the m1 whoo yes bear break time yeah looking at the full length youtube mp4 timeline final cut pro finished the quickest in a speedy six minutes resolve took seven and a half minutes while always the bridesmaid never the bride adobe premiere fell way behind the other two finishing in 12 minutes and 50 seconds over double the export time of final cut pro this means in terms of export render times for the most part the actual competition is between final cut and davinci resolve with both having the upper hand in certain areas resolve handles the red raw footage better while final cut pro handles c200 raw light and mp4 footage better but moving over to running these same export tests on my imac 2020 things change significantly what we can see is that when using a dedicated graphics card with an intel processor resolve beats both premiere and final cut pro in every export test bar one while final cut pro finishes very close behind resolves export times once again the bloated fish that is premier flops about limply in last place all while charging 70 dollars a month for the trouble if we compare my macbook m1 to my imac 2020 in these new tests unsurprisingly the imac gives the macbook m1 a healthy spanking in every timeline this is no different to my previous test using various b raw timelines in resolve only the mac m1 silicon chip is powerful but this first version is still no match for a dedicated graphics card and 64 gigs of ram the force is with you young skywalker but you are not a jedi yet but it is interesting to see that final cut pro's export times with the m1 to at least get us within striking distance of some of the imax render times specifically the c200s mp4 and xf avc footage this does lead some credibility to the idea that the m1 handles these more compressed codecs very well so what are the big takeaways from this extensive testing the optimizations for the m1 and both final cut and davinci resolve are very evident here and davinci has clearly closed the gap between apple's own editing software and if we're looking at the intel results resolve has in fact eclipsed final cut pro if only by a small margin final cut pro used to be the king of kings when it came to optimization with mac computers but now they may want to watch the throne either software is a good choice for mac editors but with the additional pro level features of resolve and the more flexible interface i would give it the advantage here premiere on the other hand is like the waning star of yesteryear that's fallen on hard times what happened to you man used to be cool i'm still cool nah you've changed man premier's m1 optimization in comparison to its competitors is well sub-optimal and underperforms in most render tests this is a shame because as a loyal premier user myself the constant bugs and under performance make adobe's exorbitant subscription service model even harder to justify if you're a mac user so we've seen the performance across the board with these better optimized programs is the mac m1 the right editing computer for you i have owned the m1 since it was released and i think it's very easy to get caught up in the youtube hype beware of youtube videos talking about the m1 beating out high spec machines the reality is this is only the case for very specific codecs in general the m1 is not going to outperform the new imacs mac pros or new pc builds which is reflected in these tests we all want the m1 to be the magic bullet solution to affordable high performance editing and while the m1 chip is amazing it's still just not quite there yet at least not in most circumstances while i would love to sell my imac and go back to editing on the m1 the reality is if you use any type of raw footage then the m1 is not for you if you do any type of heavy color grading effects work or in particular denoising or stabilization the m1 is not for you if you don't have that type of workflow and you use more compressed codecs like xfavc hevc or h.264 then the m1 will probably be quite satisfactory for your needs the m1 is also a fantastic on-the-go mobile editing system it's just not for serious full-time editing you can see a more in-depth discussion about this here so that's the bad news the good news is that this all might be about to change with the rumored release of the mac m1x in perhaps october if the first generation of silicon chips show this much potential it's hard to imagine that the m1x won't fully deliver on that promise so i would highly encourage those considering an m1 to wait for this release if you need a new editing system now and imac 2020 with an upgraded graphics card is a much better option it all comes back to the numbers and to throw another jay-z reference in here men lie women lie numbers don't if you found this video helpful consider giving it a like and upping my subscriber numbers so i can stop lying about them stay tuned for some upcoming videos where i explore davinci resolve's features and the differences from premiere pro if you're an editor drop a comment letting me know what your computer setup is and your editing software of choice as always i am the savage filmmaker and i'll see you when i see you

Channel: The Savage Filmmaker

Views: 4,037

Keywords: apple silicon, davinci resolve, apple m1, m1 mac, davinci resolve 17, final cut pro, final cut pro x, m1 chip, premiere pro, apple m1 chip, canon raw, best video editing software, apple m1 rendering, editing on m1 macbook, final cut pro vs adobe premiere, imac vs macbook m1, editing software, m1 rendering test, appl, Imac 2020, Render time, render speed, timeline playback speed premiere, davinci resolve vs premiere pro, final cut pro x vs davinci resolve 17

Id: jzpqIiell4M

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021