I’ve at all times been a PC man, even when different content material creators had been waving MacBooks round. I’ll state up entrance that I don’t recreation, so every little thing I do on a laptop computer revolves round video modifying. To deal with that, I take advantage of a high-end desktop Home windows machine at house and up until not too long ago had a Gigabyte Aero 15X laptop computer for video modifying on the go.
Then, the Aero 15X died. The keyboard stopped working and the Lightning port failed. I didn’t even actually mourn the loss — it was at all times noisy and scorching. Battery life was by no means nice, and to do any severe video work, I needed to plug it in with a comically massive and heavy energy brick.
Apple
Apple’s MacBook Professional M3 Professional is a good content material creation machine.
$2,199 at Amazon
It was time for a brand new laptop computer, however I had no intention of reliving my Gigabyte expertise. As an alternative, I needed a light-weight, highly effective and funky laptop with lengthy battery life. I wanted to edit 4K video on DaVinci Resolve whereas doing colour correction, in addition to including results and titles. I additionally do RAW photograph modifying, so I’d be utilizing Photoshop and Lightroom repeatedly, too.
I eyed a MacBook Professional M3, however figured it might be too costly. After checking, I used to be shocked to seek out that the hole between the worth of a brand new MacBook Professional and a Home windows laptop computer with comparable efficiency has been much less since Apple began utilizing its personal Silicon.
So I made the leap and bought a 16-inch MacBook Professional with an M3 Professional chip (12-core CPU and 18-core GPU), 36GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. From what I’d learn, that will be sufficient to deal with difficult edits. I paid $3,100 in Canada together with taxes, with the identical machine promoting for about $200 much less within the US.
I put my new MacBook to work instantly once I created a video evaluation of the Nikon Z8 whereas in Vancouver. Later, I edited a evaluation of the Fujifilm X100 VI in London and did a hands-on video for Panasonic’s S9 digicam from Japan. These initiatives gave me a superb really feel for the MacBook’s efficiency, battery life and usefulness whereas on the highway.
Again at house, I used to be curious to check the MacBook to my desktop PC. Whereas not state-of-the-art, the latter nonetheless has spectacular specs with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPU and 64GB of RAM.
I take advantage of mirrorless cameras just like the Canon EOS R6 II and Panasonic’s S5 II, which output as much as 6K 10-bit 4:2:2 Log H.264 or H.265 Quicktime recordsdata. These codecs normally tax a pc’s processor and GPU, so I wasn’t anticipating real-time playback.
Nevertheless, I seen that I may easily play these video recordsdata in DaVinci Resolve on my MacBook Professional with no rendering or conversion required. I can’t try this on my well-specced desktop PC, so what was happening?
It seems that even latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can’t decode a lot of these generally used codecs in actual time, as methods integrator and benchmark specialist Puget Programs revealed not too long ago. It’s doable with a few of the codecs (not H.264) on newer Intel CPUs with Fast Sync tech on DaVinci Resolve 18 Studio or later.
The flexibility to edit these recordsdata straight out of the digicam was a significant quality-of-life enchancment, because it eradicated a time- and storage-wasting step.
I additionally noticed real-time playback on my Mac in most circumstances with no rendering. That features sequences with 6K and 8K video, colour correction on most clips, titles, a number of layers, optical-flow time-warping and stabilization.
In distinction, my high-end desktop PC not solely requires me to transform my video recordsdata but in addition to allow timeline rendering, notably with 6K or 8K video. Each of these issues take up time and might devour a whole bunch of gigabytes of disc house.
Whereas the MacBook felt quick, I additionally needed to see the way it in comparison with my Home windows machine extra objectively. I used the PugetBench Creator benchmark suite, which compares efficiency between machines on generally used creator apps like Photoshop, Premiere Professional and Davinci Resolve.
Contemplating my PC didn’t carry out as effectively for video-editing, the outcomes shocked me. The MacBook Professional M3 did come out on high in Photoshop assessments, garnering an general rating of 10,076 in comparison with 7,599 for my desktop PC. That’s largely as a result of superior M3 processor.
Nevertheless, my PC out-benchmarked the MacBook Professional for video-editing by a fairly broad margin, because of its sooner GPU. The Apple machine noticed an general rating of 4,754 on the Premiere Professional PugetBench assessments in excessive energy mode, whereas my PC hit 8,763.
There are not any public PugetBench assessments but for DaVinci Resolve, however Puget Programs’ personal scores present that high-end PCs handily outperform high-end MacBook Professional fashions on that app. The PC is usually higher when working with RAW codecs and simply beats the MacBook Professional for GPU results, AI options and encoding to H.264 and H.265 codecs.
These outcomes present that benchmarks do not paint a full image. The relative energy of a pc depends upon what you’re doing with it, and in my case, the flexibility to edit sure video codecs with out rendering outweighed pure pace. Nevertheless, individuals who use extra results or work with ProRes or RAW codecs could also be higher off with a robust PC.
All that stated, loads of the stuff I hated about my Home windows laptop computer had nothing to do with efficiency. I used to be usually aggravated by my Aero 15X’s weight (for those who embrace the ability brick), warmth, noise, construct high quality and comparatively ineffective trackpad.
Since I purchased the MacBook Professional 16, I’ve by no means felt it get overly scorching and the followers not often kick in, even whereas modifying video. Against this, there’s not a single Home windows creator PC I’ve heard of that doesn’t generate extreme warmth and fan noise underneath intensive masses.
One other main bonus with the MacBook is that it affords the identical efficiency whether or not plugged in or not, however the identical can’t be stated for many PCs. Many throttle down when unplugged, considerably lowering efficiency.
If that you must edit on the go and don’t have entry to AC energy, the MacBook wins right here as effectively. Whereas modifying on DaVinci Resolve, it could possibly go three to 4 hours on battery energy alone, triple what my Gigabyte laptop computer may do. And it takes the MacBook Professional simply 1.5 hours to get to a full cost, in comparison with round 2 hours minimal for Dell’s XPS 17 9730. It expenses significantly sooner, as effectively.
It’s additionally much less of a grunt to lug than my Aero was, because it weighs a much less and the charger is way lighter, too. Lastly, the trackpad is significantly better, to the purpose that I may even edit movies with out a mouse, one thing I may by no means say with the Aero or some other PC laptop computer I’ve owned.
Not all is ideal, as I dislike the webcam notch, however in any other case the MacBook Professional 16 M3 is ideal. Because it stands now, Home windows laptops utilizing Intel and AMD silicon would possibly have the ability to match it in efficiency, however they lag far behind in effectivity. Which will change with the brand new Qualcomm laptops or NVIDIA’s upcoming 5000-series GPUs, however for now, Apple’s merchandise are arduous to beat for touring content material creators like me.