Upgrading to the Mac Mini M1 for audio and video production

well hello there my name is john meyer and this week i'm going to explain why i'm switching from a mac mini 2018 with an external gpu to the new mac mini m1 [Music] i am a musician composer slash producer who also makes youtube videos i live in pro tools and adobe premiere and although i dabble in large orchestral templates sometimes most of my workflow is smaller sessions so music really isn't the issue most computers can do what i want to do now when it comes to video that's a different story these file sizes are huge and the graphics requirements are much greater to get into color grading you really start pressing the machine so i need a machine that can handle that and currently with my mac mini 2018 it's not up to the task i've owned all the macs and that's not entirely true but it's close i started in the late 90s with the g4 and then a g5 and mac pro and i had another mac pro and then imac and i've had four or five macbook pros over the past 20 years as well up until the mac mini i would say they've all been a success except for possibly the 2013 imac the fusion drive which was a mistake that crashed on me twice i'm not here to trash the mac mini 2018 it's a fine machine i take most of the blame because i tried to get cute early on when it came out i learned that you could add an external graphics processor and i've never done anything like this but the mac mini 2018 when it came out it had a terrible graphics processor and that was on purpose they saved money and it was meant to be used in situations that didn't require intensive graphics processing when i added up the cost of buying a new mac mini a gpu enclosure a gpu and a wide screen curved monitor which i really wanted at the time and i'm glad i did because i'm kind of tired of the old imac look that price of all those components added up to about the same price of a new imag so i went with the 2018 mac mini and added 64 gigs of ram myself that was a chore you have to take the entire computer apart to get down to where you can change out the ram and i was nervous but it worked out just fine i added a sonnet external gpu enclosure and a radeon rx 580 that was probably my biggest mistake i should have gone bigger and better with the card it's difficult to find information about which cards work best for video editing there's plenty of information about gaming but certain cards work better with certain software and i got tired head and i already spent a lot of money so i just went with a manufacturer that i knew it all worked fine when it worked i had so many issues keeping the gpu connected to the computer and when i had to restart the computer i'd have to unplug the usbc or thunderbolt or whatever plug in an hdmi cable start it up and then switch it back out i'm sure i could have figured out a way to fix this but it drove me insane the 2018 was both loud and hot and very loud and very hot i recorded my control room and when the fans would kick on it would be not subtle and as far as heat you could probably cook an egg on the thing when i was exporting video and even normal times it would just get very very hot and sometimes it would get so hot that the computer would simply shut down after watching the 50th glowing review of the new apple chip i decided it was time to take the plunge so i ordered the m1 with 512 gigs of storage and i maxed out the ram at 16 gig i would have purchased a new imac if it was available i've been waiting for it and it's probably still a year away i needed to make a decision and when i looked on ebay at prices for the old mac mini and the enclosure and the card i may be able to get out of my old system the intel based system and get into this new mac mini without spending too much money although i've said that many times in the past and it never quite works out that way i'll share my pros and cons here in a minute but i gotta say right off the bat it's been great even premiere and pro tools which are not fully supported function fine and i think they're only going to get better now pro tools has never functioned fine for me in 20 years so i don't expect a lot but premiere is running smooth and for those of you that use final cut or logic i imagine those are running much better i opted for a clean install which is an absolute kick in the shins but it's working i've been migrating systems for years and i thought now would be the time to go ahead and do a clean install so it's kind of like moving from one house in the same city you just keep going getting boxes and it takes forever but it's working and each day i realize there's software that i need to install and get the license for so far i haven't had any major issues i'll start with the pros it's incredibly quiet and for recording that is huge i was so tired of hearing that fan in my quiet intimate guitar recordings and now it's gone and it also does not get hot at all sometimes i wonder if it's even on i'm i think i'm most impressed at those two things the fact that it just sits there and works overall the computer seems pretty snappy i'm on big sur see i broke all the rules new computer that's not supported new operating system that's not supported and so far it's working out so i'm taking on the risk and the burden to figure this out so that you don't have to fortunately my ancient apollo 16 interface works with the new machine now i have the original thunderbolt option card and there's a couple generations of that card the limitation with mine is that i can't plug anything into that card with the newer versions you can plug the interface into the computer and then out of the interface you can power a drive or a monitor and that leads me to the cons the first con is connectivity the m1 only has two usb c ports i think i should be calling them thunderbolt 4 ports i anyway they're usbc to me and the old mac mini had four now i did learn that they're on both machines only have two buses so even though it had four on the old one there were only two usb buses so there was the same amount of power on the new machine and i knew this would be a problem but i thought i would give it a go anyways i realized two days into it that i had to find a solution so i went with this cal digit usb dock so i could get more usb a and usbc as well as a display port an sd card reader i have so many peripherals from uh keyboards to synthesizers to hard drives i i need a lot and this even though i didn't want to spend the extra 250 dollars i found it to be quite handy and i can do everything that i need to do the second con is storage i only have 512 gigabytes now you can upgrade but you're spending a lot of money you're spending more money on the internal hard drive space than you would on external hard drive space the fastest performance we're going to get is working on that system drive although usbc drives are fast and fast enough for most everything there are some advantages to working on the drive so i'm going to experiment with working off of the internal drive for my most current youtube video and see if it does increase performance so yes it'd be great to have a two terabyte drive and if i thought this was my long-term machine i probably would have invested in that just because you always end up needing more space however with dropbox cloud services i'm trying to do my best to not fill up my system drive with things that i don't need third con is ram and honestly i don't know if this is really a con yet they say that 16 gigabytes of ram performs as well as maybe 32 on the intel based machines and i don't know the answer to that if you are in need of a computer with a lot of ram for big orchestral templates then you probably already know this is not the computer for you but if you're used to machines that maybe aren't as powerful and i'm used to the workflow of committing tracks inactivating tracks that i'm not using so i'm not terribly concerned about this i'm hoping that when the new imac rolls around in a year or so if i decide to go that route that they'll be higher ram options but maybe i won't need that maybe over the course of the next few months i'll figure out that 16 gigabytes is just fine the fourth and most frustrating con is bluetooth i have had so many issues both on the old mac mini and this new mac mini of connecting my keyboard it stutters sometimes the mouse drops out it's really frustrating i'm not the only one who's dealing with this and they made some updates but they still need to make more hopefully it is a software issue but i finally had to plug in a lightning cable to my keyboard so that i could trust that it was going to work all the time so bluetooth has been an annoyance that there are workarounds but it shouldn't be a problem and it is i know i listed more cons than pros but this really is a great machine and i'm glad that i made the purchase even though it's not completely supported i hesitate offering buying advice to you because we all have different needs but this fits in that sweet spot where it does everything i need to do audio wise and it's also a pretty dramatic improvement on the video side of things now i still need to make proxies for some sessions which is where you create smaller versions of the video to work with and then export the full video i'm working on this eight track multi-camera and it just made more sense for me to spend the time at the beginning to create lower res files that i could work on that's part of my workflow i'm used to it just a little extra work at the beginning but overall this has been a success [Music] i think this new apple integrated chip experiment is going to be really good for us i suggest you wait a little bit longer if you need your machine to work perfectly all the time wait for these manufacturers to support the software fully i'm fine with dealing with a few hiccups every now and again i kept the old mac mini around because i thought oh i'll switch back and forth i'm not switching back and forth that's a giant pain our computers change every day and to go back so i'm in it and i will continue to update you in the future on how this is going i do hope you enjoyed this video and found it helpful if you did please subscribe hit the like button that really helps me out and i'll talk to you very soon

Channel: Jon Meyer Music

Views: 41,291

Rating: 4.9640522 out of 5

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Id: XWoeTo7VzWU

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021