Shot in 8k Edited on M5 MacBook Pro

This video is shot in 8K. Every single frame of footage used to make the video you're watching right now was made up of 33 million pixels. That's 800 million pixels per second just dripping with the impossible clarity of the pores in my ragged middle-aged face. Today I'm talking about the Sony a7R V and whether or not the new base model M5 MacBook Pro can handle the demands of 8K video. This is what we in the business call a specific video niche. My aim here is to see if I can edit 8K footage on the base model M5 MacBook Pro. Now, I don't want to mislead you. You can't actually see this video in 8K. And actually, I'll probably never see the 8K version of this footage. My highest resolution monitor in here is only a 5K Apple Studio Display. I have no plans to export 8K movies in this decade. I'm over here wasting $3,500 on a new camera and tearing through SSD space basically for the sole purpose of making it harder for my MacBook to edit with a pretty cool side effect that when I zoom into my face to make a point Now, this zoomed in view is still in perfect 4K. Where with my pathetic B cam angle over there, zooming in produces a paltry 1080p. Not to be confused with 2K, which is what movie theaters use and is almost identical in size to 1080p. Or 2K, which monitor companies use to describe 1440p screen resolutions. Not confusing at all. On my Space Design Warehouse channel, I test computers to see what they can't do. Some of you are watching this over on my other channel focused more on camera stuff, but this is relevant to you too. Especially if you've been thinking about shooting in 8K. Can this laptop handle it? Sort of. Mostly yeah. Yes, but for just this main camera view, I am consuming 1 GB of card space every 40 seconds or 100 GB per hour. And I have this second camera over here shooting in 4K just so I have something to throw to for scene changes or if I have a bad take. So for the last video I made, which was the first video I ever shot in 8K, that project file is 140 GB. And this video has no sponsor, but here's a link to a video I made about my NAS. Because if you intend to keep your old projects to refer back to later, you will need many terabytes of storage. This one has a 10 gigabit network port and NVMe drives so you can actually edit directly off the drives inside this thing over the network. Anyway, 1 GB every The smoke machine, it's supposed to just add haze to the room, but it ends up putting like a fire behind me. 1 gig every 40 seconds is actually super good compression. Since I'm shooting on h.265 compression or the XAVC HS setting on the Sony a7R out a little. And I thought it would be a lot more of a disk space burden shooting in 8K, honestly. But this camera can shoot in either 200 or 400 megabits per second for four times the resolution of 4K. What's that, Nicholas? Four times the resolution, you might say. But eight is only two times four. What are you talking about? Fun fact, when we say 4K, we're actually measuring the number of pixels across the screen. And actually, 4K footage on YouTube is only 3840 by 2160. But 3.8K doesn't have the same ring to it. When you double that to 8K, which is actually 7680 by 4320, it's not two 4K pictures side by side. That would be long and skinny. It's four 4K pictures stacked like this. I don't know why we do say 1080p and 720p, but we don't say 2160p. None of these are whole easy numbers. We had already established a funny naming convention for the older two. With 4K, suddenly we're referencing the width of the picture rather than the height of the picture. 1080 is the height of that picture. And 4K is just four 1080 pictures in a square. It's apparently wrong to call 1080p 2K, even though it's just about 2,000 pixels across, the same way 4K is just about 4,000 pixels across. It's all very odd. And I see exactly no reasons to shoot in the higher bit rate since the final product will already be oversampled at 8K and downsampled to 4K. 4K resolution is already disgustingly clear and does absolutely no favors to a well-lit man in his 40s. And one of the main reasons I've personally wanted to shoot in 8K instead of 4K. Again, not to make an 8K product. There are like seven of you out there with a monitor that could even produce that image. Plus, YouTube doesn't even offer that as a service. No, instead, and if you've seen my videos, you already know, I like to maybe annoyingly punch in on my own face when I say something impactful. Or sometimes rude. Or sometimes just another way to hide a bad cut. Or if I've hit the smoke machine button for a little too long and now my background doesn't match the previous 2 seconds. But I want to try to hide all that from you. And now when I do that, like I said a minute ago, I can zoom in to 200% of this picture and still have a native impossibly clear 4K shot of my rough skin and overgrown eyebrows for all the world to see. It's the same trick the new iPhones play with their native 2x and 8x lenses. Where it's really just a 48 megapixel sensor cropped into 24 megapixels of the middle of it on the 1x and 4x optical lenses. Anyway, I'm off track and now you're up to speed on what 8K is. Now let's see how 8K does on an M5 MacBook Pro. And I do have some good news. If you've been following my channel for a bit, I thought with pretty strong conviction and evidence to support this that I had discovered over the last few months that I am in fact not a power user of Mac computers. This M4 MacBook Air with the default 16 gigs of RAM, Apple's current weakest offering, has been fully capable of being my main editing rig for this YouTube channel. Well, with this new upgraded camera, I can confidently say that at least with the way I had been using Final Cut Pro, that is simply no longer true. And I may have regained my power user status, if temporarily. With 16 gigs of RAM, one cannot edit a multi-cam video project if one of the angles is being shot in 8K. Even if you switch the viewer to better performance rather than better quality. That's only giving the CPU, GPU, and media engine a break. And unfortunately, this is a RAM problem. It would appear that even with no other programs running on my computer, the moment I start the playback and cutting up of some 8K footage, the RAM will immediately sit right up under the 16 GB of usage and regularly taps the swap and the memory pressure gets into the red. Watching the actual CPU and GPU specs on the side of the screen. Interestingly, editing 8K is not actually a heavy lift for the computer itself. So when I first started working with this, I realized that I don't think this is a CPU GPU problem. It's a RAM problem. And I absolutely needed to know if I was right about that. So I found myself buying another M5 MacBook Pro yesterday with 24 gigs of RAM to confirm my suspicions. Ah, still got the paper on it. This is the cleanest this computer will ever be. Somebody please talk me into selling one of these. I'm not going to make $2,000 off this video. This is just some good old YouTube R&D right here. Tim Cook, if you're listening. And what do you know? At least on the first run-through of the footage, 8K is completely smooth on this new computer. These guys have the same CPU, same GPU, same everything except for 24 gigs of RAM instead of 16 gigs of RAM. And you can clearly see why right away. The moment you start actually working on the edit, start scrubbing and chopping this little masterpiece up, RAM usage is immediately over 16 GB. It just needs more than that. But not over 24 GB. At least not yet. And as far as just cutting up the footage, we're in a pretty good place. That is, though, until you do anything else. Unfortunately, at least with the animated titles I like to use, there is apparently just too many pixels flying around and too much RAM being used. And so when I get to where I'm playing back a second layer of the footage over the first layer with me rotoscoped out of it with a magnetic mask so I can put a title floating behind me in this room, you can see the GPU gets pegged to 100. The playback gets choppy and the RAM just goes right up against that 24 GB limit. if I just add one more layer of background in, it all falls apart. But what if I were to tell you there is a way? Enter the wonderful world of transcoding. This is not new at all. And in fact, it used to be mandatory with Intel processors and 4K footage. One of the joys of the M series of processors for video editing for me has been that even with 4K footage, even with sometimes three camera angles all with 4K footage, I've always been able to edit at full resolution without using proxies. Using h.265 saves lots of SSD space and lots of time. But you can pretty much forget about all that if you want to shoot in 8K and have anything less than an M4 Max. A proxy is a copy, a second set of every video file in a project that Final Cut Pro can optionally transcode of all your media. You have a choice between ProRes proxy and h.264. ProRes proxy is the easiest video file for your computer to handle the playback of. With h.265, Sony's XAVC HS, the original 8K files are heavily compressed. So in order to play them back, the computer has to decode them in real time. It's basically reconstructing each frame of the picture from the compression every time you hit play. And in the case of 8K, it's doing that for 33 million pixels per frame. In this case, 24 frames per second. That's a lot of work. ProRes files flow like rivers made of visual data, freeing up your computer's resources for effects layers, color correction, titles, transitions, whatever else. And now at that same spot in the video project that broke everything before, and I have background render turned off, everything runs perfectly smooth. No dropped frames. I can even add a film grain on an adjustment layer on top of it and the GPUs are still not being used at 100%. And these proxy files are in 4K. So it's not like you're editing with some kind of low-res, hard to see what you're looking at type of footage. There are two ways to go about using these proxy files. If you've already imported your footage, just go to the footage in the browser window to the left of the viewer, right click on it, and choose transcode media. Choose proxy media, and my suggestion is to go with the ProRes proxy at 50%. And if you're going to change the color space of your clips, make sure you do that after you create the proxies or everything's going to get all [ __ ] up. It takes the computer a few minutes to do the transcoding on this. For some reason, it's only pulling about 18 watts while it's doing it. So for whatever reason, Apple has decided not to throw the entire weight of the CPU and the GPU behind this process. We're hovering around 90% of the GPU and only at 50% of the CPU usage during the process and the computer doesn't heat up at all. So there is no thermal throttling bottleneck. On only using 11 gigs of RAM, so no issue there. And for a 44-minute 8K clip, the transcoding process took 8 minutes and 54 seconds to finish. Not bad at all. So, I guess this is like a loaded before your lunch break situation and walk away from it. Though, the computer does not at all become unresponsive during the transcoding process. So, there's still plenty of system headroom to go do emails, go look at a YouTube video, go do whatever else on your computer while it's doing it. I do run TG Pro on this computer now to keep it from thermal throttling. It costs like 10 bucks, but it lets you tell the computer's fans to turn on before it hits the thermal throttle limit, rather than the default system's fan curve, which for some reason doesn't turn the fans on until after it's already slowed down your CPU. I always thought that was weird. Prioritize sound over performance on a pro computer? TG Pro lets your computer run cooler, which is ultimately better for longevity, too. It's a worthwhile tool. Now, I recognize that just sounded like a commercial, but I assure you they do not know I exist. Also, there's a link in the description. So, then, now you've got your transcoded proxy files, here's how to use them. And it's so simple. Just go to the viewer, where it says view, go down to media playback, and pick proxy preferred. If you say proxy only, then your B-roll and like your image overlays won't work, cuz they won't have proxies. But, proxy preferred will use proxies anywhere you have made proxies. Oh, wait, I said there's two ways to make proxies, and the other way is really simple, and it's in the settings where it will automatically make proxies of anything you import during that process, during your initial ingest of footage. And that's way easier, because importing 8K footage takes a while anyway, cuz it's so big. So, you can just set it and forget it. And to set that up, just go to the settings in your Final Cut Pro, go to import, and go to create proxy media, again, ProRes proxy at 50%. And when you're running proxy preferred, you honestly can't even tell it's happening, especially with 8K footage, because the 50% size footage is 4K, which is going to be more pixels than is in your viewer size anyway. Final Cut just quietly swapped out all the real files for proxy files. You can edit like you normally would, even using magnetic masks and tracking objects and all of that. When you're done and ready to export, switch that pull down on the viewer to optimized/original, and export. Editing on ProRes proxy also skirts this current RAM leak problem we're having in OS 26, with Final Cut Pro and VT decoder just running away with RAM. I don't know if that's been happening to you, but specifically, if you edit 4K H.265 footage on multiple angles. For me, on all my computers, including my M4 Macs with 36 gigs of RAM, the RAM just goes up and up and up until they run out eventually. And the fact that editing with ProRes proxy fixes that means that that was a media engine problem with H.265. I had been just quitting and restarting Final Cut Pro every 10 minutes or so to deal with it, but editing with proxies completely sidesteps that bug, which is great. Though, I expect that whole thing will be a thing of the past in an upcoming OS update. And when you're all done and you've exported your file, you can politely ask your computer to delete those proxy files to save hard drive space. Doing this doesn't change anything that you've edited, and if you want to go back to that project file later and do more with it, you can still recreate the proxies. All your edits will be there just like you did them. To do this, first click on the library file on the left, then go to file, delete generated clip files, and select everything, hit okay, and it'll delete just those extra proxy files. And in the case of a 45-minute 8K video, this gets you back between 30 and 40 GB of space on your SSD. I edit everything on an external Thunderbolt drive, just because it uses a ton of space, and I only have I don't know, 150 GB available on my Mac. With Thunderbolt, it's almost just as fast as your internal drive, so an NVMe Thunderbolt external enclosure is a good way to go. I'll put a link to this one in the description. Now, finally, back to the base model M5 with just 16 gigs of RAM. By using the proxies, yes, this little engine that could can edit multi-cam 8K video project files with absolutely zero compromise, which also means, goddammit, I am still and how is this even possible? I'm practically shooting IMAX movies over here now. I am no power user after all. I said good day, sir. Oh. Ooh. That was a Christmas-themed public still life.

This video was shot in 8K with the Sony A7RV - and edited on the M5 Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM. I wanted to see if the base model M5 was capable of handling 8k video, and with the raw h.265 video it absolutely isnt. But it turns out that mostly a RAM issue, so when you give it 24GB of RAM instead, now it can view and cut up the 8k. But adding complicated edits with layers still becomes too much for the laptop to handle. This is where Proxy files come in, which in this case, saved the day! TG Fan Control affiliate link: https://www.tunabellysoftware.com?fpr=nicholas82 M5 Macbook Pro: https://amzn.to/4j3shCU Sony A7RV 8k Camera: https://amzn.to/4qes6XJ Link to my NAS to hold files: https://amzn.to/4qhdsz5 They do make smaller, cheaper ones: https://amzn.to/4alZaZi My External Drive: https://amzn.to/49b4KM2 NVMe Drive: https://amzn.to/44CzTXd 0:00 intro 0:33 Why Shoot in 8k? 1:36 The Realities of Shooting in 8k 2:44 8k is 4 times 4k 5:24 I May Be a Power User Afterall - First Test 5:50 Can M5 Handle 8k Straight Out Of Camera? 6:34 Its not a CPU/GPU problem, its a RAM problem! 7:33 The Wonderful World of Transcoding Proxies