For those that know my opinions on the Apple world - me including Mac in a thread title is probably a tad click-bait.
Never said it’s not good kit - but it is (IMO) usually either over-priced or beyond affordable for people short on funds.
However - this review by Mr Alex Tech (who many DR users here follow, I know) should be of interest to anyone with an older Mac/Macbook or Windows PC/laptop … that finds DR a struggle and is contemplating an upgrade.
This is possibly of particular interest (thinking about myself) to those with a Macbook/Laptop that’s more than adequate for everything they do, other than DR.
Replacing either of those with newer, ballsier, versions is never cheap (either platform), and this is where adding an M4 Mac Mini to your kit might actually be cheaper than that upgrade.
This review suggests that the base M4 Mac Mini (+ external drives) is way more than capable of the job for the average hobbyist, and is more that worth a consideration.
For my personal requirements (including complex Fusion compositions), I’d need more RAM, etc, … so I’d have to look at more than the base model. And for a while (for several reasons) that’s not going to happen. But, were those “reasons” not the current deal-breaker, I’d most definitely be considering this route for my “Editing (only) setup.”
Quite impressive for sure - realistically unless you have a screen already and keyboard / mouse etc your still under a grand really for a decent setup for DR and I am sure it will handle the studio version without any issue. I have a Mac Air M2 with 8 gig of ram and it blasts though stuff on DR Studio and I paid a fair bit more than £1000 for that setup.
The other great thing is these machines will outlast any of their windows counterparts. My folks have my old MacPro that must be like 8 or 10 years old and yeah its a perfect machine for emails / web / watching videos etc - not sure how well it would hack a DR edit but my other Mac Pro I had that was like 5 years old with 16 gig of ram would render a 4k file in about 20 mins in comparison to the M2 with half the ram that did it in a few mins - crazy how the speed of these machines have come along.
The mini 4m does seem to be great value for money. Quite tricky to justify the £200 extra for the 512gb SSD over the 256gb unit though when you can do what Alex did here to get 2T for less than that.
In my case I do have both - I have an MS USB wireless keyboard and mouse that I use on my laptop at times that is as easy as unplug/plug in, and a huge screen that’s HDMI and as easily swapped over.
For most aspects, there is no difference. Probably the most significant performance requirement difference is the AI functionality in DR, and the Mac version has been developed with Apple Nerual Engine in mind - which this Mac Mini has, and that won’t be being used with the Free version anyway.
The DR AI functionality probably flies on it. (He’ll do a review on that at some point I’m sure.)
That’s not really true. I’m happily running Studio quite intensely on my 8 year old laptop. (And will be needing to for some while yet. )
yeah generally Windows machines if they are looked after well and every now and then you do a full re-build will last ages. I have had a few Windows machines that I have had doing all sorts of things from rendering video / media servers etc that are over 10 years old and as long as they dont have the bloatware stuff on them they generally don’t slow down to a halt - also Win 10 seems to be way better than the old days of XP in this regard too.
I have shocked a few of my friends in the past that want to turf out a 4 year old machine because its SLOW - its not slow its just not been well looked after with spyware etc crawling around them - a full restore back to new will see it fine again.
Chances are the main thing is Macbooks and Laptops with any balls are way over £1k … and, as you say, even allowing for monitor and keyboard, this is a well under £1k.
Only upped my RAM on my laptop from 8GB to 16GB in all that time. If it wouldn’t accept 32GB then I’d have done that. Makes a lot of difference for the Fusion work I do.
If you know anyone with a .ac.uk email account (ahem) or anyone with a school/college account then the Apple edu store is 10% across the entire range, used to be 20% (bastards)
As for video editing if you’re using Mac, FCPX written by the people who make the hardware, for the hardware takes some beating.
The only trouble with FCP is that it takes up loads of room on the SSD, when it’s rendering footage.
I was tinkering with FCP on Sunday afternoon and it stopped rendering a short 8 minute video, because the temporary files had filed my 512GB internal drive.
I probably did something wrong, so need to watch a few YT videos.
)
