I sit 5 ft in front of a 65 inch calibrated 8K HDR display that's Decklink'd to a Windows based workstation tower and NVIDIA 3090, a second 32 inch monitor for the Resolve panel interface, JBL Synthesis 7.3 system audio, Logitech wireless keyboard and trackball mouse, Blackmagic Speed Editor. It won't fit in the airline overhead bins. In the winter it heats the room. Unfortunately, it does this in the summer as well. But the same system I edit and grade on is for movies and music. This is immersive video and audio, man-cave style. There are guest/family rooms with regular 4K for Jeopardy, ESPN.
Minimum RAM for Resolve (MacBook)
- Thread starter Samuel Dilworth
- Start date
Peter C.
Veteran
Docking stations originally started for office jobs where you work both at the office and home. This would allow you to maintain and setup one computer that’s both mobile yet can be easily connected to docking stations that give you all the benefits of a desktop like large monitors
Doug Jensen
Veteran
It's all about being portable and super mobile. I have two MacBook Pros and I can disconnect them from their peripherals (5 daisy-chained SSDs, a 17" OLED, 48" 4K Bravia, 24" external computer monitor, Bose sound system, Leader Waveform/Vectorscope, Logitech keyboard) and take my Macs on the road in less than two minutes, and then still work comfortably from anywhere at any time. I could never do that with a desktop.
Doug Jensen
Veteran
How much performance do you need, really? There's nothing I've thrown at my M2 that it can't handle with ease. I wait for nothing. If you snapped your fingers and doubled or tripled my processing speed it would make absolutely zero difference in my user experience. Unless my wife leaves a glass of water too close and I fry my computer, I can't see any excuse to upgrade anytime soon. Someday, I'm sure I'll find a reason when I need to run some super-duper new application or handle an exotic codec, but I don't see that coming anytime soon.
My brain is the limiting factor in the speed of my workflow, not hardware.
Last edited:
ahalpert
Major Contributor
yeah but if your media is on externals then what are you going to work from? I mean, maybe if you have a single project on a single SSD... but a lot of people with desktop-oriented computers are not using bus-powered SSDs anyway. I guess you could load the project onto a portable drive. But if you're going to go to that hassle, it still makes sense to me to buy a desktop machine and then get a cheap laptop for travel. because the desktop is superior to the laptop
Last edited:
ahalpert
Major Contributor
occasionally my machine has struggled under the load of serious compositing, like 12-16 streams with effects onscreen, or similarly a single shot that's been carved into several pieces with feathered masks and each treated with numerous layers of effects. on rare occasions, my m1 max would refuse to even process/playback shots like those
some effects, like noise reduction or skin-blurring effects, take much more time to process than I would like
my upscaling software takes more time than I would like
the processes I do really frequently that I would love to speed up include applying fancy transitions and analyzing clips for optical flow. I do both of those a lot and I would love the result to be instantaneous but there's room for improvement. analyzing for dominant motion could also be instantaneous but it's generally faster per second than the other two.
working with high-resolution large-file-size TIFFs in FCPX was also kind of a non-starter. Way too slow. So I always convert them to JPEGs, which work fine at the same resolution. not that big of a deal, but still.
so for all those reasons, I had been hoping that upgrading RAM from 32GB to 64GB, upgrading my CPU/GPU, and putting my project media on the unbeatably-fast internal SSD would help speed things up.
My plan had been to upgrade my M1 Max after 5 years. My daughter broke the screen after 1.5 years and I had dead pixels on the leftmost inch. It was going to cost 40% of the computer cost to fix so I decided to just wait and upgrade it after 3 years instead. I lasted 2.5.
My plan now is to upgrade my M3 Max after 5 years. That could change if there's some hot new thing in computing before then and it makes sense to switch. Alternatively (and more likely), if the new machines in 5 years aren't that much faster and if my processing needs remain constant, maybe I'll go for longer than 5 years.
So far my experience on the new computer is interesting. Some things, like exporting, are marginally faster. Some things, like beginning the process of analyzing for optical flow, take the exact same time as before. But then the actual analysis is much faster. And the TIFFs I've brought into FCP have given me no issue. But these are 20MB TIFFs and not 100MB TIFFs like those I've struggled with before. So the jury is still out.
There's also the possibility that NLE choice makes a big difference for these things. Does FCPX utilize RAM as well as Resolve or Premiere? I dunno. But it's always been rock solid for me and dependability of the software, hardware, and software/hardware combination is really my top priority.
I should add that when I went back to using my old i5 (or is it i7?) MBP for a couple days while waiting for the new one to came in, I was struck by how similarly smooth playback of XAVC-I + LUT was. But of course exporting a 3-minute long edit with some effects and CC took about a minute whereas on the new machine it takes 10 seconds or less. and once I was looking at anything more complicated than footage + LUT, I had to go to Better Performance rather than Better Quality playback.
Last edited:
Doug Jensen
Veteran
That is easy.
Last summer I bought into the SanDisk Pro-Blade ecosystem and have never looked back. Absolutely love it.
When I am at home, I use the Pro-Blade Base Station with 4 x 2TB blades as main editing drive. The Blades come in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities with over 2000 Mbps speed, so you can mix and match them however you want -- up to 16TB. I find that 4x 2TB (8TB total) meets my needs for current projects. I also have a fifth Blade that is 4TB I can swap with any of the 2TB Blades. Each drive is recognized as a stand-alone drive so they can be ejected, copied, backed-up, formatted, etc. individually. When a project is completed, I just archive the project files to a couple of other drives and clear off some new space for the next project. 8TB is enough for several of my projects to be ongoing at once.
When I am going to be working on the road I have the option of bringing the whole base station in a little Pelican case, or just ejecting and bringing any of the individual Blades. Usually the single 4TB Blade is all I need when traveling unless I will be on the road for several weeks. That's where the Pro-Blade Transport comes in handy. It's a dock for any of the single Blades. Bus-powered and still over 1500Mbps. Works great.
BTW, some of the reviews at B&H complain the Base Unit is noisy. Not mine. It is whisper quiet 99% of the time and only occassionally does the fan or something kick in (once every few days or weeks during a complicated render) and then it is still only about as loud as most other high-speed drives. So, take the reviews with a grain of salt. I wouldn't stand for it if it was noisy.
Last edited:
Doug Jensen
Veteran
No way. I can just pick up my computer and be out the door in a couple of minutes and be working on the exact same machine no matter where I am. 20 years ago I would transfer stuff back and forth between a PC laptop and a desktop about once a week when I traveled and it was a horrible experience and hassle. I'd never do that again. Never.
So, what do you think is superior about an Apple desktop? That is a serious question. I haven't even looked at desktops for 10 years or more, so I'm not up to speed. What do you think I'm missing out on compared to my M2 MacBook Pro?
ahalpert
Major Contributor
that makes me feel better about shelling out for the 8TB internal SSD. 8TB of SanDisk Pro-Blade is on sale for about $1,100 now down from $1,600. The marginal cost of upgrading my MBP from 512GB to 8TB internal was $2,400. So, 1.5-2.2x more expensive. But look at how fast it is:
Yes, this drive will only ever service this machine. But I don't use any hard drives for editing that are more than 3 years old. As the technology and interfaces improve, I'm continually updating. So in 5 years it might be obsolete anyway.
But the bigger point is that even though Mac internal drives seem expensive, they're cost-competitive with comparable drives and you can't actually touch them for speed with an external (though maybe some come close). And since I work...pretty much exclusively on this machine...there's no need to pop out drives or transfer anything or bring any accessories with the machine. Just grab and go.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I would think that with your Pro-Blade ecosystem it would be much less painful to switch between machines.
With the desktop you can get 24/76 CPU/GPU cores vs 16/40 on my M3 Max. And you can get 192GB RAM vs 128GB, although I doubt many of us need that.
But the larger benefit -- which, to be fair, is just speculation on my part -- is that the thermal situation of the Mac Studio is probably far superior. I don't know that for a fact but I know that laptops are designed for portability and desktops are designed for performance (although they're clearly trying to make it compact). From what I've read, overheating your laptop (which can happen pretty quickly during complex tasks) will make it perform like a base model or worse.
What you can do hypothetically and how you actually work can be different things. I've shot out of town weddings with travel, and usually if I'm needed for that it's family or friends. I'm wrangling checked baggage, camera equipment, audio, supports, through the airport, and sleep deprived after rehearsal dinners, long wedding/reception, local transportation, morning after breakfast, hotel, airport, connections. I don't have much interest or need to edit on the plane or road when I'd rather shut my eyes, it can wait. Getting back intact with all my stuff accounted for, memory cards. The only review I have done are the in-camera playback, which by that point you've got what you got, hopefully didn't miss anything.
My windoze machine:
My windoze machine:
ahalpert
Major Contributor
is that your virtual drive in RAM or the actual SSD?
Doug Jensen
Veteran
My M2 MacBook Pro has 96GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD with the same speeds as your 8TB SSD. While it's nice to have a fast internal drive in a pinch, but I'm not going to use it as my primary editing drive. And If you think that 5400Mbps offers any advantages over the 2000Mbps Blade drives, then you are living in a different world than I am. It's like thinking a 800Hp engine in your car is going to get you to the grocery store faster than a 500Hp engine. Things don't work that way in the real world. Once you cross a certain threshold, having additional power or speed provides very little extra benefit.
Obviously I'm not going to convince you to do things my way, and none of your arguments so far have convinced me to give up my external drives or trade my laptop for a clunky desktop. Everyone has to find what works for them. But when my wife spills a glass of water on my Mac or a grand kid breaks the screen, I'll just plug my Blade station into my other Mac and get right back to work. A system that is built from individual, easily upgradable, and swappable, components works best for me.
You've undressed me. But nevertheless, the enemy of fastest is 'fast enough.' There is enough speed for realtime 12k playback with USB-C SSD's like Sandisk Extreme Pro portable, and direct raw capture from camera. Anything more is gravy imo.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
not if you're shoveling footage into a processor as fast as you can rather than playing it back in realtime
it's crazy that my SSD is almost as fast as your RAM
Resolve/Fusion and timeline footage run from ram, with buffered, page swapping to disk, not like shoveling manure into a processor. And then there's the matter that working with 8K/12K raw files, you're not actually writing that resolution to video ram either unless you are connected to such a display. In other words, processing a 12k raw file while writing to a 4K monitor memory space is far less demanding because the 4k memory frame is only 8 Mpix image versus 80 Mpix.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
Internal SSD has 61% the latency of external.
I think we're talking about 2 different things. Playing back a single stream vs compositing and heavy layers of effects.
I know the pain points I've been having with my machine. And about once a year I get a project where I'm like whoa can this handle it. And I usually have to export some of my layers in a base composition and work from there. It's stressful and made me feel like an upgrade was merited.
But I have little idea which component/s were the bottleneck. It's not super clear to me from reading online. And even though I only had 32GB of RAM, my "memory pressure" gauge never showed problems.
I figured a faster CPU would be the most impactful upgrade... I dunno.
In truth, I would have kept my M1 Max for another 2.5 years at least had I not broken it.
And going internal SSD has just as much to do with losing my strap-on externals as anything. But it's nice to get a speed boost out of the deal. And it may even be a bigger boost to performance than the other upgrades I purchased. It's certainly a bigger difference from my external SSD in raw performance metrics. Is it wasted overkill? Probably not all of the time.
I can't say for you either, but I know that in the PC universe, it's not the CPU, ram or drives that makes the difference, it's the GPU. The 3090 like the 4090 have 24GB exclusive memory for the NVIDIA GPU processor. That makes the difference. A few years ago I upgraded from the GTX1080TI to the RTX3090, and upped my CPU ram at the same time to 32GB from 16GB. The NVIDIA took up 3 slots so I had to replace the tower case and power supply, to 1000 watts. The old motherboard and Intel i-7 8700K CPU remained. When you look at the Resource Monitor, you can see the demand on CPU, ram and drives are low, not bottlenecked much by Resolve. The GPU and its memory on the other hand are the workhorse.
The only substantial advantage I see from fast drives is faster copying, and then you have to consider what's happening on the other end of the copy, the card reader and the read speed of the CFExpress/XQD card or media. I haven't noticed a slowdown from compositing, not saying there isn't one, but multicam timelines with 4-6 open 4k windows add to the churn, 8K noise reduction really does, and 8k noise reduction with cross dissolves is the breaking point for out-of-memory exits. It happens because the cross dissolve is blending (2) 8K frames simultaneously, which doubles memory usage for two open copies both being NR'd at the same time. The fix is 100%, place cuts at each end of the transition, then switching off NR for the two clips cross-dissolved underneath the transition window. You don't need NR during a cross dissolve and NR continues after the dissolve.
I think a lot of people overlook NR, consider it unnecessary or only a fix for dirty underexposed footage. In my case, raw files viewed in native 8K-12K, and zoomed in 250-500% (or sometimes more) I can apply just the right, minimum amount of NR to cleanse just the noise without harming signal detail. Way more people don't care than do, aren't aware of it, don't see it, lose it (and the finer details) to codec compression, and are happy. But I see it, have the right tools for managing it, and would be confident you wouldn't see it nor lose signal detail if projected inside the Las Vegas Sphere. Not necessary but neither is 8K, I do it because I enjoy it and that's the only reason.
The only substantial advantage I see from fast drives is faster copying, and then you have to consider what's happening on the other end of the copy, the card reader and the read speed of the CFExpress/XQD card or media. I haven't noticed a slowdown from compositing, not saying there isn't one, but multicam timelines with 4-6 open 4k windows add to the churn, 8K noise reduction really does, and 8k noise reduction with cross dissolves is the breaking point for out-of-memory exits. It happens because the cross dissolve is blending (2) 8K frames simultaneously, which doubles memory usage for two open copies both being NR'd at the same time. The fix is 100%, place cuts at each end of the transition, then switching off NR for the two clips cross-dissolved underneath the transition window. You don't need NR during a cross dissolve and NR continues after the dissolve.
I think a lot of people overlook NR, consider it unnecessary or only a fix for dirty underexposed footage. In my case, raw files viewed in native 8K-12K, and zoomed in 250-500% (or sometimes more) I can apply just the right, minimum amount of NR to cleanse just the noise without harming signal detail. Way more people don't care than do, aren't aware of it, don't see it, lose it (and the finer details) to codec compression, and are happy. But I see it, have the right tools for managing it, and would be confident you wouldn't see it nor lose signal detail if projected inside the Las Vegas Sphere. Not necessary but neither is 8K, I do it because I enjoy it and that's the only reason.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
So your NR switches off right as the transition begins? Hmm seems like an imperfect workaround. Not a huge deal either way. But I guess you're saying the system won't play back the transitions for you with NR applied? Why not render the transitions when you need to review?
I would have thought that the GPU would be more important. But I've looked at my activity monitor and I'm not sure I've ever seen a taxing amount of GPU used.
To be fair, I don't really know how to read it. CPU and GPU usage are listed as a percentage for each application. But the percentages go higher than 100%. So, is each core 100%? I'm confused.
I also don't know which processes/applications are multi-core and which can only use a single core.
I played back the project I'm working on in real-time and at 200% speed. RAM used by FCP fluctuated between 23GB and 26GB, with about 30GB left unused by any program.
CPU fluctuated from about 80% to 300% and GPU stayed around 50%.
There's a CPU pressure gauge and on occasion with my old computer I saw that get relatively high but not in the red.
Of course, it's also possible that FCPX does a poor job of utilizing system resources. I wouldn't think so, but it's possible. Maybe Resolve is better.
I should find an old problem project and see how the new machine handles it...
In any case, if you're exporting a 3-minute edit and it exports in 10 seconds then it's going to run through footage way faster than during playback. And if you're loading files into your RAM, that seems like a case where the file copying process can take advantage of all the speed you have to offer.