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New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

ringoes9
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

I am trying to upgrade my computer hardware and would like to know whether the following are adequate for my R5 II photos and videos. I do not have major video video processing, but occasional video processing.

1. Macbook Mini Apple M2 Pro with 10‑core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine, 16GB RAM

2. Microsoft Surface Laptop - Snapdragon® X Elite (12 Core), 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Does Mac Mini M2 Pro require 32GB RAM for photo or video processing or 16GB would be sufficient?

Microsoft laptop is used for travel and occasional editing. Since these are non-Intel processors, not sure how how the Lightroom performance is.

Sep 15, 2024 at 02:53 PM

moondigger
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

I have a Mac mini with M2 Pro, 12 core CPU, 19 core GPU, and 32 GB ram. I’ve done some photo and video processing on it, and it works well. I don’t know if it would work as well with only 16 GB ram. My guess is that it wouldn’t work as well for me, because I often stitch frames, and the resulting 100-400 megapixel images can take a lot of ram to manipulate.

That said, I do the vast majority of my photo processing on an iMac Pro with a Xeon CPU and 256 GB of ram. I honestly think 256 GB is overkill — I believe it would all work just as well with 128 GB ram. But I feel like less than 128 GB would be a problem when I’m working on a 400 megapixel file with a bunch of layers.

I don’t know how well Lightroom runs on the Snapdragon CPU, as I’ve never tried one. But it runs just fine on the Apple M-series CPUs.

Sep 15, 2024 at 11:20 PM

Z250SA
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

A Mac mini 10-16, 32Gb, 1Tb is the one I would get today unless...: The Next Big Thing Around The Corner: The next gen M4 processor.

As I have a tendency to stay long with my gear, present iMac is a 2010, and does everything I need except photo/video editing. The history teach me to get gear from about the next highest fifth of the lineup. You pay a premium for the highest end gear. But the lower you go the fewer the happy days are. The new M4 mac minis should be with us next Spring, I guess. But I might go for a Studio if I feel lucky.

Sep 16, 2024 at 03:32 AM

dmahar
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

Hi, I can't comment on Apple products but have extensive experience with Surface devices. Five of the 7 surface devices I have owned have failed within 2 years of careful use... I still use one for daily tasks but have moved to core i9 based gaming laptops and now a core i9 gaming tablet with nvidea gpu for photo editing. As a benchmark my current Asus Rog Flow tablet processes full res R5 raw files in DPP software almost 50 percent quicker than does my late model core i7 surface pro. Thus, if you want to play outside the Apple eco system I think i9 based gaming laptops/tablets are well worth a look. Happy shopping Doug

Sep 16, 2024 at 07:17 AM

rscheffler
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

ringoes9 wrote:
I am trying to upgrade my computer hardware and would like to know whether the following are adequate for my R5 II photos and videos. I do not have major video video processing, but occasional video processing.

1. Macbook Mini Apple M2 Pro with 10‑core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine, 16GB RAM

2. Microsoft Surface Laptop - Snapdragon® X Elite (12 Core), 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Does Mac Mini M2 Pro require 32GB RAM for photo or video processing or 16GB would be sufficient?

Microsoft laptop is used for travel and occasional editing. Since these are non-Intel processors, not sure how how the...Show more →

I'm on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro with only 16GB RAM and frequently have 6-10 apps running and lots of Safari tabs open, plus run Lightroom and rarely do I run into noticeable memory constraints (the system will warn when it has run out of memory). When I monitor memory pressure (using Activity Monitor), it's usually in the yellow zone. I'm only processing 24MP files and do a lot of batch editing/processing, but rarely find I'm waiting much. Things can slow slightly if images have a lot of AI masks and other edits applied and the preview renders have to update. Regular editing in Lightroom is usually smooth and single exports are only a second or two. The slowest process in my workflow at the moment is incorporating Adobe's Denoise function to batches of images (hundreds to up to one thousand). With my system and Adobe's recent optimizations of Enhance/Denoise, it's about 15 seconds per file. With 45MP I would expect it would just take proportionally longer. I have also used this system to edit 4K video in DaVinci Resolve. It was smooth and exports were pretty fast - at least fast enough for what I needed working on primarily ~5 minute clips.

If I was to do it again and it was within budget (one reason I went with only 16GB a couple years ago - budget constraints), I'd get 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD instead of 1TB (I shoot a lot and things accumulate on the system drive) and also as many GPU cores as possible. More for future proofing, to a degree. But those options also significantly increase the price of the Mini M2 Pro. The SSD size is IMO the least critical because you can always add an external NVMe drive in a TB3/4 enclosure to increase storage.

The Mini with M2 Pro chip is kind of getting into that price range where you could look at a refurbished Studio with M1 Max for only ~$400 more. You get fewer CPU cores but more GPU cores and 32GB RAM.

Of course this can become never-ending, where adding more features/capabilities increases the price and then overlaps with another product class or category.

Sep 16, 2024 at 12:26 PM

Hairy Heron
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

Sep 17, 2024 at 04:57 PM

mawz
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

Sep 18, 2024 at 02:42 PM

CelesteForza
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

Hairy Heron wrote:
Wait until early/mid October. Apple is set to release the new Mac mini M4. It's going to beat the pants off the M2 model and standard RAM on the base model will be 16GB vs an upgrade now.

What he said!

Sep 18, 2024 at 02:59 PM

ISO1600
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

I'm also curious if anybody here is even running one of the new Windows Arm setups yet, and what they think of it. Comparing the new generation Win/Arm chips to i7 of yesteryear is like talking about Mac before their M chips.

Sep 18, 2024 at 05:36 PM

snapsy
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

For Lightroom the best way to dramatically improve editing performance is to use Smart Previews, which are basically proxies but for still images. The feature was originally implemented to support editing offline files (think a laptop with external drive, then taking only the laptop to the coffee shop to edit) but IMO it's greater value is the performance improvement in editing using the previews. Normally Lightroom will only use the smart preview if the original file is unavailable but you can force it to always use the smart preview when available in the performance tab of preferences.

Sep 18, 2024 at 07:53 PM

StephenS_CP
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

I've been using a Surface Pro 4 since 2016. I've only ever had 2 problems with it. I replaced the battery last year. Now, the screen is starting to go bad and has some pressure spots on it, and the keyboard is giving out. After 8 years of heavy use, I think its done pretty well.

I bought the up-scale model, configured with 16 Gb Ram, with an IPS screen for viewing angle and color accuracy--deal-breaker considerations for a travel computing platform.

I've had no performance problems running the Adobe and Topaz products on that machine. I'm not a professional/commercial user. I don't process "batches of images (hundreds to up to one thousand)" at a time. I will upload hundreds of files at a time and review them in Adobe Bridge/ACR and import them into Lightroom. My images are 5DSr and R5 50 and 45 MP files, respectively, processed individually usually for culling and keywording, and some post-processing either for validation that they will be usable or for immediate upload to Flickr.

Your inquiry led me to spend a lot of time looking for good photo-editing tablets. My desired specs are aRGB color gamut coverage and color accuracy (delta-E). Unfortunately, none of the reviews I could find had more than 2-sentence generalities for the displays. I did narrow it down to the 2 Surface Pro 11 models [or the Surface Pro 9 for the legacy screen?] It seems to me the OLED screen must be designed for video...supports the P3 (sic) [near but not quite aRGB color space] and huge contrast ratio for HDR compatibility but possibly weak on color accuracy. The LCD model, while not having the OLED black levels, seemed to be the more color accurate IPS panel. I've had no color or contrast complaints with images processed using the Surface Pro 4 IPS panel after I've moved them to my IPS-panel desktop LR.

I've done SOOC video playback on the Surface Pro 4 but I don't take many or process videos.

Sep 18, 2024 at 09:11 PM

fraibert
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

I know OP mentioned limited video usage. However, I think it's worth noting that Apple does support H.265/HEVC 10 bit 4:2:2 color video decoding in hardware, while apparently the Snapdragon Elite X does not. This may be relevant because that particular video codec and color settings are used in a number of the R5II video modes (and in other Canon R cameras, as well).

It may not be relevant here but it has proven an issue for some on PCs that were built for video editing in recent times because, on the PC side, only Intel CPUs and GPUs support H.265 10 bit 4:2:2 decoding in hardware. People have built high end systems with AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs only to discover that the system chokes when trying to directly edit H.265 10 bit 4:2:2 video. The solution in such cases is to transcode the video to a mezzanine codec and edit that proxy, though this adds extra time.

Sep 18, 2024 at 09:56 PM

crisdesign
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

Are you planning to use both systems or is one or the other? I assume you don’t plan to have a mix of OS in your workflow.

I don’t see why anyone would choose a laptop other than a macbook for travel and media editing…

An M2 with 16gb should be really capable, if you do a lot of stacking and stitching you might want to upgrade to 32gb and you’ll be set for the next 5 years. As others have mentioned, M4 upgrades are around the corner, it might be worth waiting a little bit https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

For comparison my macbook air M1 with 16gb ram works great in lightroom to edit r5 raw files (but just ok in lightroom classic) connected to a 5k display.

Sep 19, 2024 at 02:59 AM

moondigger
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

fraibert wrote:
I know OP mentioned limited video usage. However, I think it's worth noting that Apple does support H.265/HEVC 10 bit 4:2:2 color video decoding in hardware, while apparently the Snapdragon Elite X does not.

I can confirm that the Apple media engine built into the M2 Pro (and other M-series CPUs) is excellent for H265 10 bit encoding. It's actually the first hardware encoder I've tried that strikes a good balance between file size, video quality, and encoding speed. Other hardware-accelerated solutions I've tried fail to strike that balance, usually because of visible artifacts bringing the video quality down. I fail to see any benefit to high speed hardware encoding if the resulting video is riddled with artifacts.

If you want to ensure the absolute highest quality and/or smallest file sizes, then software encoding is still the gold standard. But the media engine in the M-series CPUs does remarkably well, and much better than the other hardware encoding options from Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD.

Sep 19, 2024 at 10:23 AM

arbitrage
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

A good YT channel to really dig into the specs that make a difference for different photo/video software when looking at Macs is ArtisRight. Just find his videos that relate to the system(s) you are considering.

https://www.youtube.com/@ArtIsRight

One such video:

Sep 19, 2024 at 11:48 AM

osidesurfer
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

arbitrage wrote:
A good YT channel to really dig into the specs that make a difference for different photo/video software when looking at Macs is ArtisRight. Just find his videos that relate to the system(s) you are considering.

https://www.youtube.com/@ArtIsRight

One such video:

It's also a great channel for Mac monitor calibration.

Sep 19, 2024 at 01:57 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

There is also an Apple high-end hardware benchmark thread here at FM primarily focused on LRC performance, though hasn't been updated since Nov/Dec 2023: https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1831862/

Sep 19, 2024 at 11:40 PM

tsangc
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

FWIW Canon DPP is still not native on Apple Silicon. It feels about twice as fast on my M1 Studio (10 core, 64GB) as the old 2009 Mac Pro (4 core 2.66GHz Xeon, 16GB)

So if you're like me and use DPP, it runs emulated in Rosetta2.

Sep 21, 2024 at 01:35 AM

ringoes9
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

Thanks for all suggestions and opinions. The reason for checking about Microsoft Surface because I am seeing a lot comments that those systems are beating Mac M3. Though I can see that some of those comments are sort of marketing, I am thinking whether those Windows ARM machines are worthwhile to look. Right now there are some good rebates going on for Samsung’s ARM based laptops.

Sep 21, 2024 at 10:07 PM

moondigger
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · New Hardware for Photo/Video processing

ringoes9 wrote:
The reason for checking about Microsoft Surface because I am seeing a lot comments that those systems are beating Mac M3. Though I can see that some of those comments are sort of marketing, I am thinking whether those Windows ARM machines are worthwhile to look. Right now there are some good rebates going on for Samsung’s ARM based laptops.

From what I’ve read, the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite is topping one benchmark test — multi-core performance— vs. the 8-core M3 Macbook Air. The Mac they’re testing against is notable because it contains the ‘base’ version of the M3 processor, rather than the M3 Pro or M3 Max. And the Macbook Air doesn’t contain any active cooling, so if you tax the CPU, performance is throttled to keep it from overheating. In other benchmarks — such as single-thread performance or GPU tests, the M3 Macbook Air tests faster.

Compare that same Snapdragon Elite to an M3 Pro or M3 Max in a system that has a cooling fan, and the Surface falls behind in every test, including multi-core performance. It can’t keep up with even the older M2 Pro or M2 Max in most benchmarks.

Setting performance considerations aside, there’s one other reason you might want to avoid Windows on ARM — native software availability. One of my coworkers has a Microsoft Surface, which works pretty well for him using Microsoft-provided software. But he often complains about the relative lack of third-party ARM-native software.

Sep 22, 2024 at 08:43 PM

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