Can MacBook Pro M1/M2 or Mac mini handle 4K/8K editing, or do I need M4?

VideoEditor45 wrote:

My question is would macbook pro M1 or M2 / mac mini M1 or M2 handle 4k or 8k footage without struggling? Or is that just for M4? I do have a budget if I decide to upgrade.

Keep in mind that

• Doing complex video editing is something that works better, when you have lots of RAM
• RAM is not expandable on any Apple Silicon Mac
• Many of the M1 and M2 MacBook Pros and Mac mins that you find on the used market will have fairly small amounts of RAM.

E.g., many 13" M1 MacBook Pros and M1 MacBook Minis had only 8 GB of RAM, and none had more than 16 GB of RAM. With a plain M2 chip, you could custom-order up to 24 GB of RAM – but if you are talking about the M1 and M2 processor generations, you would need a Pro or Max chip to get to 32 GB (or, for a Max chip, beyond).

Macs with plain M4 chips can have up to 32 GB of RAM. Those with M4 Pro or M4 Max chips can have more.

Thanks for the clarification.

One thing I will ask, what is the make, model and size of the external SSD and also how is it formatted?

The reason being some external drives may not play nice with particular computers and operating systems. It has been noted across the web and personal experience that not all external SSDs play well with every computer (PCs included). There are many instances where a particular SSD will work great with an Intel Mac but be problematic on an M-series Mac. Even at that, some drive may scream on an M4 Mac but be a slug on an M1 Mac (I experienced this).

I have a 2017 iMac (i5 8GB RAM) which could handle 4K well in FCP and Resolve (it died before Christmas!) so I think your MBP should easily deal with 4K in Premiere unless you are doing something incredibly complex.

Many people report issues like yours on the Final Cut Pro forum and in most cases it is user error or something that can be corrected easily. It is rarely a problem with the computer per se.

M1 and M2 minis are only available used. The latest base model M4 costs £599 in the Apple Store but is heavily discounted elsewhere . . . £530 on Amazon and many other outlets.

Chrome browser and Clean My Mac together with all other "cleaning" or "optimising" apps have often been implicated in cases of poor performance with pro-apps.

My old i5 iMac had no problems editing native 4K video straight from the camera . . . no need to transcode or render unless it was a particularly complex project. I could get up to 7 4K tracks (PIP) unrendered with colour corrections playing without dropped frames.

My M2 mini is about twice as fast rendering and exporting and my M4 around 3 times faster.

When you say "using proxies", do you mean that you are remotely connecting to the app in the office over internet? Is the data you are working on located at your home when doing this or at the office? Also, what is your internet speed and are you using WiFi?

In any of those cases, the issue is likely the internet connection does not have the bandwidth for the task. Also, with internet connections there are likely interruptions in the data stream that when doing any sort of "real time" work can cause all manner of issues.