M1 Max... Difficult, very difficult. Plenty of GPU cores I
see, not a bad CPU either. There's a thirst to prove yourself. I can hear all the YouTubers
blown away by the magic, where to put you. Let me see. I understand what you're
trying to tell me, but no. I don't wanna see you rendering a single vide clip of you
picking flowers at the park. What I want to see is
you eating explosions, crying over particles,
stockpiling graphic animations. I want to see you scrolling through a 500 layers
After Effects VFX sequence where your competitors leave
all their sweat and blood on the render battlefield. Then and only then, we will
know what you have inside. M1 Max. (instrumental music) - I have always edited videos and motion graphics on Windows, but today I would like to
give a little bit of homework to the latest Apple babies. We are going to open the
same After Effects projects on the M1, the M1 Pro
and the M1 Max MacBooks and my Windows desktop workstation that features a very
powerful i9-10940X processor and an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Graphic Card. Maybe you remember that
video I posted a while ago on comparing Premiere to Resolve. Well you know the
project file of the intro it had like not just one layer, not two layers, not 10 layers but 500 layers stacked
on top of each other with plenty of different
effects, Motion Blur and no pre-renders so I thought it would
be a good stress test. I will also render other types of projects and do some testing on the worst Resolve projects I could find because I use DaVinci Resolve
just as much as After Effects. Will the M1 Max processor beat
the beefy desktop computer, thou almighty king of render speeds? Let's find out. (ethereal music) We will be using the
latest version of Resolve, version 17.4.1 and the
latest Beta of After Effects that have been both
optimized to run natively on the Apple M1 chip. Before talking render times, I wanted to take a look at generic actions that I do on a daily basis just to see how all the
different setups behave. First, startup time. So, I took my stopwatch and I timed how long After
Effects took to launch and have the same project
ready to go on each device. The MacBook Pro all took
around like 7-8 seconds and the desktop computer twice as much. Then, I took a look at general scrolling and playback for all four computers. As I move the playback head, I tend to find better performance on the M1 Pro and M1 Max laptops. The desktop computer is a
bit behind and more laggy, and the M1 is even slower. So the MacBook M1 Pro and
Max are the winners here. In order to measure playback
and preview performance from a more scientific standpoint, I cleared all the cache
after loading the project and I timed how long it would
take for the playback head to reach 10 seconds of preview at half of the Full HD project resolution. So, an ideal realtime preview would therefore take the
playback head 10 seconds to reach the 10 seconds mark. It took the M1 32.5 seconds, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max 19.5 seconds and the desktop workstation 15.5 seconds to reach that 10 seconds mark. Another test I did is applying the well known 3D Camera Tracker effect on a 30 seconds clip recorded
in ProRes 422 Ultra HD. And then well, here the
results where very surprising because the M1 MacBooks where much faster than the desktop workstation. (upbeat music) Now, let's talk render speeds. I really spent some time making sure every computer would have
the closest starting state as possible. The very same After Effects
performance settings, the same software versions, all plugged into a AC power source and at the same room temperature with all memory and SSD cache
deleted before each render. On the big, 500 layers
After Effects project, that one minute intro in 1080p
with Motion Blur turned on, we can see that the M1 finished
rendering in 23 minutes, the M1 Pro and the M1
Max at around 17 minutes and the desktop PC in
just around 11 minutes. On this other project that
doesn't use the same effects but is still a good benchmark because of the multiple layers in 3D space and the particles involved, the results look pretty consistent with what we've had previously. I also opened a more simple project in which I made explanatory
workflows almost in 2D space. As opposed to the previous projects, it has quite a few precomps
and nested compositions so I was curious to see the results. Again, we can find the
same kind of results even though the M1 Max GPU
started kicking in a little. Finally, I opened a straightforward
After Effects project with very few effects and this ultimately confirms the fact that the M1 Pro is a very
close call with the M1 Max when it comes to After Effects projects. So, when I finished
conducting these tests, I thought the latest M1
chips are really awesome and it's completely insane
to see a desktop workstation power into such a portable laptop. But why buy the more expensive M1 Max when the M1 Pro seems to have
almost the same performance? Like what's the point? Well actually, the problem
comes from After Effects itself. This software has always
been very strongly CPU based and even though the latest M1 Beta on Mac brings an impressive leap forward in terms of multi-frame rendering, most of the software still
relies heavily on the CPU. So, almost no effects
actually use the GPU, it is only used for very
specific tasks in After Effects. Since both the M1 Max MacBook and the M1 Pro MacBook
both share the same CPU, I guess this is why there
is very little difference between the two on After Effects. But what about other softwares? There is one in particular
that gave surprising results. And it's DaVinci Resolve. Let's get going. (upbeat music) I opened the worst DaVinci Resolve project I could find on my computer. This 25 seconds video for Middle
Things has plenty of clips, fusion effects, fusion
titles, sound effects, fairlight effects and both spatial and temporal noise reduction on every single clip in the timeline. I think it's a good example
of a real world project. Well guess what, on that project, the M1 took around 16 minutes, the M1 Pro 7 minutes, the Windows i9 workstation,
3 minutes and 31 seconds but the M1 Max was the fastest of all finishing at 3 minutes and 30 seconds. When looking at the GPU utilization, it is clear that Resolve makes a much smarter
use of the GPU resources efficiently using all
of the available power on all the 32 cores of the M1 Max. So when using Resolve, the M1 Max will likely be just as fast as a powerful top of
class Windows workstation, 2 times faster than the M1 Pro and almost 5 times faster
than the M1 processor which is already a beast in its class. (upbeat music) Now let's wrap it up. Is the M1 Max more powerful than the good old big and
beefy desktop computers? It's close, but the M1 Max still has slightly inferior performances so I think the big
computer still beats it. Am I switching from the big i9 workstation to the latest M1 Max MacBook Pro? Maybe, time will tell and I will update you in
my pinned comment below. Even if I don't see myself doing 100% of my jobs
on the MacBook Pro yet, I do finally see a
laptop as a viable option for working on projects when I'm on the go instead of using TeamViewer. In 15 years, I have never managed to do video editing properly on a laptop. You see that XPS15
laptop, well it has an i9, but It's by far and questionably the shittiest laptop I have ever used. I invested around 2000 euros after seeing very good
reviews online at the time but after only a year,
I got CPU throttling at like 0.5 GHz. The speakers stopped working,
the webcam isn't detected, WiFi dropouts and it
always seems as though its soul is burning from the inside just when I go and google. Is the M1 Max better than the M1 Pro? Well ultimately I think it really depends on which softwares you plan to use mostly. Both of those MacBooks share the same CPU, they're only different on the GPU so, do some research on
the softwares that you use. To what extent they
actually rely on the GPU? Have they been optimized for the M1 chips or are they running
under Rosetta emulation? From my experience, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects are
known to be very CPU based, so I don't think you will
notice that much of a difference between the two in your everyday life. For Resolve though, it is a
completely different story and for this reason, I think I'll keep you my dear little M1 Max. (ethereal music)
