M5 MacBook Pro as a Main Video Editing Rig

This is the base model M5 MacBook Pro. And I actually have two of these, one with 16 gigs of RAM and one with 24 gigs of RAM. I'll be using them both here. If you're a video editor, I think I have some good news for you. You almost certainly don't have to wait for the M5 Pro or M5 Max to come out, or if those are already out when you see this, you don't have to pony up that extra cash, unless you've got other needs for large CPU and GPU core counts. And I'm going to spend the rest of this video talking about why. So then the M5 MacBook Pro. By the time you're watching this, I will have edited this video fully on this M5 MacBook Pro. Although I am going to recommend that you beef up to 24. My channel's video editing isn't obscenely demanding, though I am shooting with two cameras, which in Final Cut Pro will be playing back simultaneously during the edit. And my main camera is now an 8K video stream shot in the H.265 codec. On Sony cameras, that's called XAVCHs. On Canon cameras, that setting is HEVC. It'd be super cool if everyone just called it H.265. They don't. And I'm shooting in 8K for two primary reasons. One, I review Mac computers, and it is getting increasingly difficult to come up with hard things for these chips to do. Like, if you shoot your videos with just one camera in 4K, maybe you've got a color correction layer and some titles and some B-roll. You don't really need anything beefier than the M4 MacBook Air to do that. So, I wanted to make sure that I had a setup that would demand more from these laptops to try to pin down where the limits are and when you might actually need to upgrade to the Pro or Max over, in this case, the base model M5. And this is if you are primarily a video editor or primarily getting this to do video editing. But then also shooting in 8K gives me this hugely enhanced refframing flexibility in exchange for using up way more SD card space. I'm shooting this main shot in 35 mm now. It used to be 50 mm before, which means I can pull this shot out as wide as this or zoom all the way in as tight as this and all of that within this same shot. And the resulting video that ends up on YouTube is native 4K all throughout that whole range. 4K is an 8 megapixel shot where 8K is actually a 33 megapixel shot. So, it's four 4K pictures. So much SSD space. And before getting this new camera, I had never edited with proxies before because generally with 4K footage, M series Mac computers just don't need to. They can pretty easily handle a couple of native 4K resolution streams without even stressing the CPU or GPU. Apple has this media engine, which is a completely separate chip, an actual piece of hardware that's dedicated to just decoding and encoding video. So, all that processing is offloaded, freeing up your CPU and GPU to do whatever else you want to do to this footage. Adding grain, animating titles, color grading, whatever effects you're using. And you can see that here. These graphs are showing the CPU and GPU usage. And while the timeline plays just straight video of me in my studio, the computer's hardly using any resources at all. We're at 13% of the CPU, 20 to 30% of the GPU, just playing back the footage. Then, as the timeline reaches this adjustment clip where I added some grain, now the GPU is moving up to 30 to 40% usage. When it gets to where I've added the color correction layer on top of the grain, you can see the GPU goes up to 50 to 60% usage. So, then we get a little bonkers. We're stacking the grain and the color correction layer. And now a whole second instance of me where I'm talking cut out from the background on top of the background so that I can slide in this animated title behind myself. And that title has well, let's just see. Yeah, this title has a bunch of layers of its own. Whatever it's doing, this is like a title pack I downloaded. But even with all that going on, there's still plenty of headroom. I'm only using 15 gigs of RAM. The GPU is at about 70% utilization. The computer's not heating up at all. And this is where the relative complexity of what you're up to in your editing workflow comes into play. Oh, wait. No, I wasn't done talking about proxies yet. I feel like this is important. And actually, I think we should all just be using proxies all the time. Now, feel free to skip this mini deep dive into how H.265 265 versus ProRes proxy codecs actually work and go to this point in the video if you don't want to learn something. But, you know, I think this stuff is interesting. In the settings for Final Cut Pro in import, if you check the box for create proxy media, and it doesn't even have to be lower res. Using proxies used to mean using crappy low res versions of your footage so that it'd be easier for your computer to use. But I'm creating my proxies at 4K resolution. M5 can handle it. It'll change the video files format from H.265, 265, which is a really small and compressed file to this ProRes proxy file. It doesn't really change it. It makes a separate copy. ProRes proxy is really easy for your computer to play back, but the file sizes are bigger. Super quick file format background. And this is the explain it like I'm five version of what's really happening because that's way too boring and would take way too long. H.265 video compression is not just compressing blocks of color within each frame the way JPEGs do it. like in a JPEG, this black square behind me, which is my big wide computer monitor, it would count this whole thing as one pixel cuz it's all the same black. Instead, H.265 is analyzing the frames of your video and how they change from one frame to the next. And then it's doing one of two things. Either finding sections of the video where the frame doesn't change at all from frame to frame, like in the background, or portions of the background anyway. So, like my little subscriber counter here, you might as well just put a picture of it right in front of itself. This is a good time to remind you to please subscribe to the channel to make that number not static, make it bigger. Or it's measuring the changes in the frames in a way where like if I pick up this laptop and I move it from here to here, the face of my laptop isn't changing even though it's moving across the screen. You're going to have to ignore the fact that the lighting is dramatically changing the fa face of it for this particular example. So essentially, the codec is examining the whole frame of the video all the way down to the pixel and it makes these little sprites like these little printouts of different portions of the frame that it can reuse. So now instead of saving all the pixels in each frame to make this video when I move this from the left to the right, it's slapping this copy of my laptop in that spot in the frame and then just saving the navigation data necessary to move that portion of the frame in the same place. And it's doing that all over this shot because saving the picture once and then the location data is way smaller than saving however many millions of pixels it takes to show this entire 8K frame. So H.265 265 is basically scanning what it sees, making little chunks, and then recompiling the video. It's recreating the reality that I filmed. And it's doing it in a way that looks exactly like reality. Clearly, my printer kind of sucks, and this does not look like reality. There is virtually no loss in quality when you're using H.265 out of the camera. There is a ton of loss after I upload it to YouTube, but that's a completely different compression story. But H.265 265 is doing this paper printout trick millions of times all the way down to tiny little groupings of pixels to ultimately save enormous amounts of space. Like an H.265 file of the same quality as an H.264 file is about half the size, no loss in quality. But this is at the cost of extra RAM and compute power because instead of just playing back frame after frame, it's got this monstrous, I guess you could call it like a choreography of playing back all these little parts and arranging where they need to move to perfectly recreate the video that I recorded. Where ProRes proxy is just brute force. It compresses each individual frame one at a time, then just plays them back one at a time without having to look at the ones before and the ones that come after, which results in larger files, but that are way less computationally intense to play back. Apple computers do have that special media engine chip to handle that H.265. So, it's not as hugely CPU GPU intensive to use that format as it used to be with older computers or even a slightly older Windows computer. They only recently started adding those hardware accelerators, but it does use some GPU and it uses a lot more RAM than [clears throat] ProRes, which is why I would recommend using proxy files to edit. It's one little check box. The computer automatically makes the files. Then using this little pull down above your viewer, it automatically substitutes the H.265 files with the ProRes proxy files just during the edit. Again, you're still editing in 4K, so the experience of the edit is indistinguishable from using the native files. And even with 8K, which I'm now having to deal with, it's not like you can see the entire 33 million pixels of an 8K frame in this small viewer window box. So, by using 4K proxies, it's no compromise in what you see while editing. The only downside is that you're making an entire second copy of all those files. One, that takes a little bit of time, but two, they're bigger. So, my video project files are now into the several hundred gigabytes per project. But once you've finished editing and you've exported and you're done, you can also, with a single selection from a menu pull down, delete all of those extra proxy files that you generated to save back that space. The edits are still there. The original media is all still there. the whole project is still the same. Which is basically why, well, at least if you're shooting in 4K with multiple cameras, you kind of need to edit off of an external drive. Well, unless you've sprung for the 1 TB or larger internal drive when you bought the computer. I've been using this retro Thunderbolt dock that looks like a mini Macintosh Plus from the 80s. It's got an NVME SSD built right into the back of it. And since it's Thunderbolt, I can beat up on that drive rather than my internal drive at the same speed as my internal drive. And then it's got a bunch of extra ports on the back and on the front cuz I'm just a wired keyboard kind of guy. And this little screen is a real 1080p screen. I tend to mirror a terminal window on this thing showing Macmon, which is just like a retro looking stats program. How much RAM is being used, how much CPU and GPU are being used. Anyway, this thing is cool. There is a 10 GB version and a Thunderbolt version. I actually have them both. And as you can see, it can be used with any Mac computer, but if you have a Mac Mini, this is designed to fit perfectly over the top of it. So, your Mac Mini just becomes a little retro Mac, whatever. Link in the description for this thing. I love it. The Thunderbolt version, I mean, depending on which NVME you buy for the Mac, is legitimately as fast as the internal drive on this MacBook Pro. Now, with the proxy description out of the way, please let me show you why you might want to use those in the first place. Well, a if you're shooting 8K, I think that's a vanishingly small number of us so far at this point, but I am. So, some of you are. I mean, look at this punchin clarity. But if you were to try to play back native 8K and then you start piling on these adjustment layers, you do not get very far. It actually handles playback. It handles the grain. It can take the color correction. But as soon as I get to an animated title, we are dropping frames. We're dropping frames pretty bad. Scrubbing at that point is like two frames per second. But turn on proxies. Smooth. Everything is smooth. Scrub around all you want. Forget 8K. Nobody's using that. Just with a single stream of 4K. All of the aforementioned effect layers piled on. Let's keep going. Without proxies first and see where this thing gives up, and then I'll turn them back on to show that in some circumstances, if you're someone who uses a lot of effects, you can get pretty dense with your editing, even on the base model M5. I shot this in 4K H.265 and I'm playing back the original footage here. Am I too far in front of this mic? I think I am. Add grain. No problem. Add coloring. Great. Fine. Going straight into the magnetic mask extra layer on top of the base layer with the animated title behind me. Everything is still playing back smooth, but look over here. We are now using all of the GPU resources. That is at 100%. So if I add just one more element, just one more title on top of the whole thing. That's it. It all falls apart. That is until you turn on those proxy files because the proxies make it that much easier for the computer just to play back the raw video. So now there's more resources for all the junk you want to pile on top of it. And look at that. We're back to 80% GPU. Let's keep on going. Blam. The background is a cartoon. Real-time render. There is no background pre-render turned on. Still smooth. More layers. Here's a bad TV effect. Still no problem. So, how about we 8bit everything that's running behind me. Well, it's still running smooth, but now the picture is completely destroyed. And I think that I've made my point. This laptop is now playing back eight layers, two of which are made up of a dozen of their own layers. So, really more like 30 layers of effects. All of this is real-time calculating and real-time rendering on top of the full resolution 4K footage. And I wasn't even watching the RAM usage down here in the bottom, but it looks like this was all happening on less than 16 gigs as long as you have the proxies turned on. So, running this same video project file back on my 16 gig M5 and with the proxies on, this thing can work on this file 30ome layers and stay out of the swap. And that is a ridiculous case. So, in a world where you're just making videos that look more like mine, shot in 8K, mind you, but thanks to the 4K ProRes proxy files, this 16 GB RAM M5 MacBook Pro can edit it perfectly. And the RAM usage is often under 10 GB with a normal video project file. RAM really only starts to pile up with all of those extra effects. And my videos don't get much more complex than a multi-cam shot peppered in with B-rolls and titles with the occasional magnetic mask to make a point about something to shove something up into the background behind me. That all said, personally, once my video is done and I start the export, I like to just jump into working on the thumbnail while that's happening, which means now I need Photoshop and sometimes Lightroom running in addition to Final Cut Pro while it's doing the export. And this is also when I'll open up some emails and probably listen to Zach from JerryRig Everything tell me all about that Rivian R2 in the background. So for me, it is at least a 24 gigs of RAM life from now on. And 32 to 36 is honestly preferable for me. Know thyself. But just for video editing, the 16 gig base model M5 MacBook Pro is still all you're going to need to make very polished, very nicel lookinging YouTube videos. And that's even in 8K. So talk about future proofing. I guess aside from using ondevice AI, and if you're someone who uses AI tools, that's a whole other bug bear, which a isn't ready, and b, I don't know, it's just a different subject for a different time. You may have noticed I've opened up memberships on the channel. There should be a little join button down below here. Now, I have created a Minecraft server that's going to open up on certain days, initially to test out this unreleased UG NAS device. Not allowed to talk about this thing yet, but this thing has super beefed up specs. So, part of the video that I'm going to make about this is testing out when I can make it fail. I'm curious to see how many people I can get to connect to this little Minecraft world that's running in here right now before it crashes. So, I have added a 99 cent membership tier if you want to be a part of building the space design warehouse downtown project just to see how Lord of the Flies that all gets. You can join that and you'll get a link to the Discord with all that information. I'm going to launch it this week. It's actually already on and running. The Discord is already up, just doesn't have any members in it. But I want to set like a specific time that we all go in there and start building stuff. I don't know. I don't actually know how to do any of that. I'm learning it right now. Goodbye.

In this video I tested wether or not I could use the base model M5 Macbook pro as a primary video editing work computer. Ive recently switched to shooting 8k video so editing has become more demanding, but by using ProRes Proxy files and sacrificing SSD space for CPU/GPU overhead, this computer can handle it easily! The Wokyis Retro Thunderbolt SSD Hub: https://amzn.to/3OAJoRg THE best NVMe SSD drive Ive tested: https://amzn.to/4adLL5d A newer, somehow cheaper, somehow faster NVMe: https://amzn.to/4cmvsnQ The M5 MacBook Pro 16GB: https://amzn.to/4rd8aFJ The M5 MacBook Pro 24GB: https://amzn.to/4kGiBiz I use motionVFX for titles, find them here: https://motionvfx.sjv.io/Qj3yja the homebrew command for 'macmon' : brew install vladkens/tap/macmon I also use TG Pro for automatic fan tuning so M5 never overheats: https://www.tunabellysoftware.com?fpr=nicholas82