Video Editing on the MacBook Pro M3 Pro

Finally a video with out all the extra hype about the latest chips and benchmarks

I bought my first, completely new MacBook a year ago, and since then not a day has gone by when I am not surprised by how powerful it is. It is only the 13" MBP with M2, but 24 GB and 1 TB of storage. I have used many different computers and operating systems over the last two, nearly three decades, and yet I have rarely had as much fun working on them as I have on this MBP. Mine is already a beast, so yours must come straight from hell. ;) I hope you have lots of fun and enjoyment with your new tool. Greetings from Germany

I once in a while stumble across great videos like these that go in depth about what other creators don't really talk about. I appreciate this. I hope you keep creating the fire content

This is exactly the sort of testing that reviewers should do when assessing video editing performance of a system. Nearly every other YouTube reviewer limits themselves to very basic playback tasks and rendering / exporting workflows. The reality is that in many cases >90% of the time video editing is spent on the timeline (trimming/moving clips, adding transitions/effects, adding text etc.) - unless you are heavily into color-grading or motion-graphics. You are generally only exporting videos "a few times a day" - possibly only once every few days if it's just a hobby, so it's the speed and responsiveness of the tasks you perform hundreds of times a day where the difference is felt. It's great to see that even with zero optimizations that the M3 Pro is keeping up with multiple 4K video streams. This means there is a lot of room to push it even further with appropriate performance speed ups (see below). A few observations from your video that might be interest: (1) You were using a UHD timeline in the project, but this is generally not necessary and you can edit everything in 1080p and change it back before final renders/exports. There is no quality lost doing the edit in 1080p because the underlying video is still UHD/4K (with a few exceptions for effects/color-grading/keying which should use the full resolution).  The 1080 timeline will put a lot less load on the system and unless you are editing on a massive 8K screen, you will probably not see the difference between a 1080 viewer window or a UHD one given it's normally less than a quarter of the screen real-estate (2) I understand that changing the timeline resolution in the project settings is different to altering the Playback->Timeline proxy resolution setting. I think the difference is the stage at which the resolution of playback is altered - i.e. only for monitoring, or before other processing. This can change the impact on performance, and has some gotchas when doing text or effects work to prevent you using low-resolution inputs instead of your high-resolution source material. (3) I also noticed that in your project settings, the proxy media output was set to ProRes 422 HQ at the same resolution as your timeline - which is the highest quality (non-RAW) version of ProRes, and generates very large files that are unnecessary for a proxy workflow. The default should really be ProRes Proxy 1080p on a Mac, which are a lot more manageable and generally smaller than your H.264 media, with the benefit of playing back more easily when the machine is under load. (4) Resolve now has a separate application on macOS called "Blackmagic Proxy Generator" which means you can generate your proxies outside of Resolve, which is a huge timesaver because it no longer locks-up the Resolve UI while it generates proxies. The advantage of the new Apple Silicon Macs is that the generation of H.264,H.265 or ProRes proxies is hardware accelerated, and I've found it to be a 3-5x real time for UHD H.264 files on an M1 Max Mac (e.g. a proxy for a 10 minute clip will take 2-3 minutes to generate) In practice I don't notice the difference between H.264 UHD/4K files and proxies on my M1 Max Mac, but I can see that disk I/O (and a little bit of CPU/GPU load) is a lot greater when using the original source media. For 2-3 streams with minimal effects you probably won't notice, but I expect it would become noticeable the more complex the timeline becomes.

Im kind of new to video editing... i use Lumafusion on IPAD PRO M1 . It does 4k with no problem . Once again people can say what ever they like about apple/macs etc. But you struggled to edit with a desktop gaming pc, while we edit 4k on a tablet. No fans, no noise , no case ..nada. Great video simple, direct , the way it should be. Peace ✌🏻

Just subscribed, nice to see so many clear simple and calm explanations. Really nice site Sam.

Great video, finally I've found a video that gets to the points that everyone wants to know about this system

Davinci on my old Xeon server took about 2 hours to compile a video - my Macbook M3 12/18/18 (1 tb) completes the same task in 1 min, 30 seconds...!!! What the crap - this thing is a beast!

Great video. What a beast.

lovely video, keep on creating :)

Curious never stumbled over your page before good job thank you

I recently purchased the same MBP as yours so I'm biased, but it's the perfect laptop for my use case. Thanks for the review and comparison.

Idk why, but YouTube is recommending me a lot of videos of aussies reviewing Macs. Well... i'm loving it. Greets from BR for ya.

very simple thank you

For the base model. Its impressive.

Great video

Great video! Exactly what we want to see instead of weird algorithm hype

sound is crucial, thanks.

Good Video. Glad to see another Aussie making content. Just a quick audio suggestion as I had issues recently. Pass the audio through Adobe Podcast AI to get rid of a lot of the echo. A wireless Lav (like the rode) is also great vs on camera directional mics.

nice video! i have the 16 inch macbook pro M3 but i only upped the ram to 32gb (much needed)as a video editor and vlogger. the m3 macbooks are a beast for video editing...