M2 Mac Mini Editing Review: Amazing Value

in front of me today I have the brand new Mac Mini with the M2 Chip now this is the base model so in this computer we have eight gigabytes of RAM 256 gigs of storage you have the M2 Chip not the pro version on the back here you have where you plug in your power you have gig ethernet available to you two Thunderbolts 4 ports an HDMI port as well as two USB A's and a headphone jack so what I'm gonna do in this video is I'm gonna go ahead and actually edit this intro what I'm just recording right now on both of the multi-cam that I'm going to use here and then I'm going to test it out because they're both in 4k after that after we do some editing I'm going to go ahead and try After Effects right after so do some Motion Graphics work there and then overall just give my opinions on this computer now I will leave the timestamps Down Below in the description so you can bounce around this video however you would like and I also would like to share that I will have links to my intro to video editing class on nebula so if you are interested in taking a look and getting an intro based class to video editing feel free to check it out and I also also will have link the Creator's companion notion template that Thomas Made we use this template to run all of our channels including mine right here and if you are a video editor we do have a section where in notion we let you organize your b-roll tag it to whatever you feel you're gonna need and stay organized throughout the entire editing process so feel free to check out the timestamps or any of the links as mentioned but as of now let me go ahead and connect this and let's get started alright so I have my M2 set up I'm gonna first check the gig ethernet port just to make sure that I'm getting the actual internet that I'm paying for so I'm just gonna quickly go to fast.com check my internet speeds and yep just as advertised I I know I get gig here at the studio and we have one gigabyte download speed so perfect so now let's go ahead and I'm going to start by opening up Premiere bringing in the footage that I recently just made and let's just test it let's just see how it goes with bringing in 4k footage on a 4K timeline checking the ram yeah we're gonna test all that so let's go ahead and open up Premiere and get things going you'll also have to part in the background noise because we live or the studio is right by um a busy street so all right so we have this testing M2 Mac Mini project I'm going to go ahead and open that up okay and then I'm going to go ahead and create a folder so we'll just call it really quick clips we will import the footage I just recorded so these two here bring those in okay all right let's drag in my a-roll generating Peaks now let's make sure the sequence is set correctly so we have 4K yep Apple prores altitude and all that or LT all right so I'm gonna quickly organize this the way I normally would I will now go ahead and bring in the b-roll that I did shoot with this I'm going to line this up okay which so far so you guys are probably seeing not bad because this is 4K footage I am running this at full and I'm I'm starting to edit already and let's see okay so the the the memory pressure is already Rising I am looking to be at about five gigs of memory use so uh yeah I'm also screen recording so that's going to play a factor for sure how much I'm not sure okay my keyboard shortcuts are set I'm gonna go ahead and just scrub the timeline right now so let's go ahead and take a look and we're looking at Full Resolution here which already that is buttery smooth which is fantastic okay so now let's check the ram all right we're still sitting at five gigs so not bad so now if I were to go ahead and create a multi-cam sequence the question is how is that going to play a factor so multicam sequence is set we're gonna go ahead and quickly well yeah let's do the proxies real quick but then let's also make it so I can view it right there all right okay so there you go we're starting to see some uh so I'm like oh no never mind that was an anomaly I think because now this is looking pretty good now if I were to check the activity monitor where we were sitting at six gigs as I was uh scrolling so okay I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of editing here and then we'll we'll take it from there on the back okay as I am playing this I'm gonna open up the activity monitor and you can see that we're getting right to the tip of that eight gigs we're at 7.2 essentially of memory used so that's definitely already uh something that's we got to take note of to you I should probably rotate that such as well I'm speeding this up and this is still keeping up nicely I just want okay so I have edited a rough cut of the a-roll without any grading yet or anything uh I didn't do it in a multicam sequence I did edit it down and everything is running beautifully now one thing I was already noticing throughout this entire editing process was just the fact that when you were scrubbing or when I was scrubbing through the multicam sequence and I was playing it back um the ram was definitely getting eaten away so I was hovering at around 7.2 gigs so I kind of figured that the ram would kind of be something that it's gonna kind of like stop me from using this this Baseline model but the fact that you have this well of a power already and being able to edit something so fluidly I like that that's great that's great for just the price that you're getting and for possibly anybody that's looking to get this to kind of start their way into some editing now let me go ahead and quickly do just a tad bit of color grading uh just to add more to this and see if it can keep up so let's go ahead and do that which you know like I said it's just going to be a little bit I'm not going to add too much um so let's just quickly switch this workspace to coloring and then let's just go ahead and just mess with it ever so slightly so uh let's just do some some basic correction here so let's bring up the exposure get me up to like the 80s there there you go bring down the blacks ever so slightly I'm probably like right there get the whites up there a little bit um honestly that's already looking fine to me um maybe we could just add like a bit of a curve here for the contrast hold on all right and even with some very light grading oh right I hate this keyboard all right and then I also would not be framed like that I have to reframe myself ever so slightly let's get a grid going um there you are put me in the center put my yeah like that something like that all right and then if I were to color grade this right here can I just copy do a little pasting um we got to get some vibrancy so maybe like a lot will help already with that there you go look at that that actually that's pretty cool already uh let's just add a little bit of that blue I think that look kind of just fixed it for now that looks great okay now there was a better way to do the grading uh you know there is a simple simpler way to do it but you know for all intents and purposes I'm just gonna copy and paste it on all these clips and this is still running flawlessly now if I scrubbed as I scrubbed through we're also at 4.3 still so this is looking pretty promising all right so the editing experience so far is actually going pretty well so cutting down my a-roll has been going great I was able to work in a two multicam camera sequence here they're both in 4k like I said now this has been slightly graded which adds on to it and so far everything is looking fine I feel this kind of editing is the kind of editing that a lot of people just naturally will do a lot of people just don't go as hard or aren't as extensive as a lot of us creators are and that's fine and it's even more amazing that you're getting this for just 5.99 now part of my job is also to do Motion Graphics and that is where my biggest concern is going to be because whenever I do Motion Graphics I always keep my programs open I also usually have something playing in the background in Google Chrome maybe some music a movie something that's very low that I can listen to in case I get bored and I want to doze off a little bit now the thing is for just eight gigs of RAM I am kind of nervous to open it right now but I'm gonna open up after effects pretend like I'm going to do a motion graphic like I would for video video and we'll just take things from there so all right let's see how this plays out so let's go ahead and get this started with an After Effects composition and this will indeed open after effects let's keep an eye on this activity monitor as well so we're just at a Premiere I was hovering around five gigs so I'm gonna open this now in desktop we're gonna do uh test yeah we're gonna do this Mac Mini testing and this is going to be the Mac Mini test as well Mac Mini test I also don't like this section of the video that I'm in so let's go ahead and hide that we'll open this there you go we'll do that okay now let's say I'm gonna create let's see whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what's going on okay low memory warning Ram has been has been extended for previews I just Ram in the settings oh boy we're gonna probably run into that quite a few times as I can tell so let's just ignore it for now and continue okay so let's make a quick thingy for this so um technically speaking I don't need my AE stuff to be 4K I can actually do 1080p and it'll be just fine so we're gonna go ahead and do that um this will be just background this will be a solid background here okay we'll just scale that up to 150 oh no it's 200 what am I doing 100 okay that was some stuttering there even just for scaling is that gonna be oh okay maybe that was just that all right that's fine either way okay let's get this moving so let's use like a a four point color gradient to create a gradient um we'll use colors like uh usually use blue but let's let's mix it up I'll use some black today or some red rather so we'll use red and black okay so I just copy the color there copy the color there we're going to blend this just slightly okay let's let's back this up okay it's back it's back the red office too much probably down there done yeah something like that and then we can just kind of like uh I don't know mess with some of the positioning so we'll just do every point will move slightly so and let's say it'll last 13 seconds I don't know kind of just making this up as I go it's usually how it works too you you would you'd be surprised how many times like we just kind of mess with stuff to see if it looks good and that's all it takes so all right all right so you'll see that if I scrub I can at least get a preview of what's going on there the ram is getting again just ever so close and I know for a fact that if I add this grain that we would want to add to make it to make the background just look a little nicer boy I'm pretty sure that's gonna definitely take its toll there so what if I just do like a 0.8 or something is that too much green no that looks all right how's the activity there it's rubbing through if I press play now it's it's here's the thing about after effects for those that don't know much on it it's it's very Ram intensive to do a lot of previews you can do preview playback and it uses the ram that you have in order for you to be able to see in the timeline here and that is what's very important for a lot of us that do Motion Graphics because you want to be able to consistently keep playing back what you're making and then that way you also can just see the work that you're doing and it's easier to make your adjustments and if you have a lot of stuttering that happens it really takes away from what you're trying to create because you're constantly trying to adjust and let the computer catch up with you in your work uh so that's already going to be a problem I can tell like I've mentioned before but anyway so let's just go from here let's say now I want to create some I don't know some little shapes that can like hover so we'll do like a little lightning bolt there um okay and then we'll just call this lightning bolts HP for Harry Potter we can just quickly make them I don't know white I guess make them stand out a little more oh no I mean I just want it to be a solid if I'm being honest here come on solid white there you go all right so we have uh let's let's copy our shape let's put some shapes around you know kind of kind of give it a nice little um I don't know The Anchor Point is off there you go give it a nice little effect there we can also just kind of rotate it real quick just so they're not all the same or at least looking the same so we'll do we'll do one of these and the Anchor Point for that as well and the thing is I'm using a very weird keyboard so my shortcuts are not going to feel the same which is already annoying drop shadow yeah why not I had a little little drop shadow there a little drop shadow here a drop shadow there okay sure and um let's go ahead and just quickly uh give us some some softness with that one okay I'll soften that one up a little bit there you go soften that one up a little bit um we can also do we can do like a Sheen effect so let's like why not so let's just make this um a white actually I got an idea let's make it a different color here um okay again we'll scale this to 200. and then we can just kind of give it the shape here like this okay and then we'll rotate kind of like that get bigger nope should make it bigger The Anchor Point in the center for this one go something like that it's fine you do what you can so we're gonna give it a Sheen so we're also going to change the blending mode then so we'll give it let's see here oh my gosh oh this keyboard why did it why did I think this was going to be a good keyboard to use honestly okay so we're just gonna do this we're gonna make a Sheen over the 13 seconds that we intended to use this for so we'll go kind of here put go back okay so clearly it's still too small so we'll increase the scaling of it and go probably make it thinner okay and then position again from there we'll go all the way down we gotta go at an angle boy is that ever rough okay for the Feathering hmm um all right so then we can do to give it an adjustment layer really quick so we can add like a blur which also puts a lot on this um one sec here machine and then we'll call that this will be just gaussian blur or GB for now it's not usually how I would do it though but it's fine okay I'm gonna go blur all right so we have a moving background some grain we have a Sheen so to speak going around okay these little lightning bolts last thing we can do for these is kind of just give them some uh we'll probably do some rotation actually so we'll do we'll do some key framing um which will take a minute here can I just do okay cool no just copy and then I can just copy paste paste I'm pretty sure all right and then we'll do a keyframe hold this and then I'll do some some jumping effect there um all right we'll put some text on screen I got this um this base M2 Mac Mini is not so bad okay cool skill that I'll probably add more blur to help stand this out more okay and then we can do a simple glow whoops a little drop shadow with that one as well okay and then we can just animate it coming in so we can just start uh we can probably just lock these layers in so I don't keep making that mistake and then we'll just go from down here oops and then it'll just come back up to Center right there probably want this lower actually we'll do a quick um let's do value graph there I don't select what does that also like think I need okay can we zoom in more there you go now there you go all right so okay so I made this weird little comp uh it doesn't look very good to be honest but that's not the point the point is is to test this out so if I go back to my Premiere timeline now and I should be able to see now my After Effects and all that so I'm going to play this back while keeping an eye on the activity monitor just to see how everything's gonna play out here so let's take a look let's take a look and see what happens yeah that is rough okay this is just a timing thing that I should have fixed but then if we continue to go back yeah okay I honestly think I've had enough and I honestly think I know my verdict for this computer so what's it gonna be alright so what do I think of the M2 base model here's what I think after everything I've seen in this video and after you witnessing it firsthand yourself I think you have a powerful device if you're gonna buy this machine you're going to have a more than capable computer to be able to do a lot of professional work the only limitation I can see you running into is your storage and your RAM and if that's the case you can get an external hard drive which you can get pretty cheap depending on where you buy it but the problem is with the ram it costs 200 to get the 16 gig version which is the version that I probably would recommend to anybody looking to get specifically this model but the problem is for the longevity of the device to have this last for years you want more RAM more RAM is always beneficial to a computer so all I'm gonna say is this if you end up buying this computer you're gonna get a very capable machine I would just advise you to look into getting more RAM getting an external hard drive for this which I know is going to add on money but at the end of the day I'm very impressed I like this I like the portability of having a small device that I can put in my backpack and take with me on business trips or anything like that and I think if you're looking to buy this computer you already know what you intend to use it for you probably just wanted to know what it's capable of and now you can see it's pretty good so hopefully you guys got the information that you wanted from this video and if you guys have any questions or if you want to make a quick follow-up to this video please let me know down in the comment section because I would like to help out as much as I can but above all take care of yourselves and if you end up buying this machine all power to you you get a really good value device

Channel: Tony Santos

Views: 25,010

Keywords: tony santos, professional video editor, tech reviews, lifestyle, productivity, lenovo legion 5 pro, legion 5 pro laptop, Video editing legion 5 pro, legion 5 pro 2022, Gaming on Legion 5 Pro

Id: ralzJz3Q8YE

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023