Most recently hitting version 17.3, Resolve might actually be challenging Final Cut for most optimized NLE on Mac. Blackmagic Design is getting in early to the M1 chip game with a constant stream of updates for DaVinci Resolve. Software is truly starting to show its potential and getting impressively updated to take advantage of the new chip architecture. For example, noise reduction just doesn’t work on footage above 5K on the iMac.The M1 Macs just keep getting better. When you are starting to pull in effects you might see real limitations. Playback does get the frames dropped warning and there is a little lag when doing some color correction. In the library, you can scrub through the footage quite easily. However, since BRAW isn’t supported in FCP he transcoded it to ProRes HQ to see if the iMac can handle this resolution at all. Tobin grabs some 12K footage from Blackmagic. We just want to push this to some serious limits. Which is an option on the Mac Pro that you don’t get on the iMac. Now, with the NVMe SSD the speeds bump up to close to the iMac. It also slowed down with multiple cycles meaning the drives are not as efficient. Writer topped out at around 1300 MB/s with read actually starting out at 3000 MB/s. On the Mac Pro the internal SSD is much slower. Running a disk speed test, the iMac clocked in with write speeds of over 2200 MB/s and read speeds breaking 2800 MB/s. Internal disk speed makes a huge difference for editing. Let’s put them up against each other and see how they do with programs like DaVinci Resolve. This comparison uses a base iMac while the Mac Pro is the base 8-core with 160GB RAM, 24GB GPU between two graphics card, and a 256GB SSD for OS and some NVMe SSDs for editing. It’s definitely a fun, everyday style with lots of colors and decisions like having a white bezel. If we want to talk about design, this is the first major revamp of the iMac in a long time.

Specifically, we are talking about a $10,000 Mac Pro while the M1 iMac comes in multiple times lower than that. Looking at it as a filmmaker, Michael Tobin got to go hands on with the new M1 iMac and even pitted it up against the more traditional Mac Pro. Anyway, if you have been waiting for an all-in-one to come with Apple Silicon, we finally have a new M1 iMac to work with.

I have an M1 Mac mini myself and I would personally add that I am impressed with performance for video and photo editing. And all the reviews point to it being really good. Apple is just putting the M1 chip in everything these days.

Final cut pro vs davinci resolve m1