**The Power of Apple Silicon: A Game-Changer for Creative Professionals**

As I sit here with my W5700X GPU and 16 gigabytes of memory, it's easy to see why exporting 8K video on a 4K timeline can be a slow process. The fact that I'm using a powerful computer for the task only adds to the frustration of waiting for the export to complete. But what if I told you that there's a way to take this power and apply it to smaller, more portable devices? That's exactly what Apple Silicon on Macs is all about.

I've been experimenting with exporting 8K video from my iPad Pro, and the results are astounding. By transferring the video to the iPad Pro using QuickTime and Command I to open up the Inspector, I can confirm that we're working with an 8K HEVC 10-bit 29.97 frames per second clip. But here's the thing: Luma Touch, a popular video editing app on iOS, doesn't officially support 8K video. However, when I import it into Luma Touch and play it back on my iPad Pro, the result is incredibly smooth 8K video playback on a 4K timeline.

Now, before you get too excited, keep in mind that this isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. The export process still produces an 8-bit HEVC file, which is significantly less intense than the original 10-bit clip. But what's truly impressive is how seamlessly the Mac handles the export, thanks to Apple Silicon and its incredible performance metrics.

To further illustrate the power of Apple Silicon, I've taken my iPhone 12 Pro Max and inserted a dummy HDR clip at the beginning of an IMovie project. The result? IMovie detects the HDR clip and offers the option to enable 10-bit HDR for export, even though it's not officially supported on iOS devices. This demonstrates just how far Apple has come with its technology in recent years.

The implications of this are enormous. As creative professionals, we're no longer limited by our device choices or software availability. We can now work from anywhere, using devices that fit our needs and lifestyles. And with the performance metrics of Macs being so impressive, it's clear that Apple Silicon is the future of computing – not just for power users like myself but for anyone who wants to create content on-the-go.

As I look back at my own experiences with Apple technology, from the slow S1 system in the original Apple Watch to the A14 chip in the latest iPhones and iPads. It's clear that we're in a new era of computing – one where power, portability, and convenience are no longer mutually exclusive.

So what do you think? Are you as excited about Apple Silicon as I am? Do you see why this is such a big deal for creative professionals like myself? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and let's discuss the future of computing together.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso the mac hardware with the apple m1 arrives tomorrow and judging from performance on other apple silicon mac fans should be extremely excited what's up everybody this is jeff benjamin with nine to five max so recently final cut pro 10 was updated as a universal application which means that it is now optimized for the m1 apple silicon inside the new macbook air macbook pro and mac mini and this hardware should allow for faster rendering better playback performance better export capability even for high quality footage like 4k prores or 8k prores and i also imagine that it will perform pretty well for more complex types of video like h.265 hevc if you've ever tried to playback one of those videos you know the mac with intel processors can struggle mightily we'll talk about that in just a little bit but here you can see some of the testing conducted that fourth bullet point which pertains to the macbook air with the eight core gpu 16 gigabytes of ram two terabyte ssd able to play two streams of 4k uhd video at the same time 24 frames per second and of course with the macbook air being thermally throttled because it doesn't have any fans the macbook pro can better handle sustained performance over a longer period of time and in apple's example they they cite using an 8k video which is impressive right being able to play 8k footage on a more or less entry-level macbook pro so given apple's recent history with chip design i think it's obvious that you should be very excited for what this new mac hardware can mean for editing videos in final cut pro 10. so again all of the new macs including the macbook pro the macbook air and the mac mini feature this apple silicon the m1 chip and that means that all the benefits of the m1 chip come to all three of these devices but the really cool thing is the vertical integration so apple makes final cut pro they make compressor they make motion they also make the operating system that these apps run on they also make the apis that talk to the hardware and of course with these new macs they make the most important part of the whole equation and that is the silicon the system on a chip the apple m1 and really no other pc manufacturer can compete with this top to bottom vertical integration that apple has because of its prowess with design so what this means is that apple is able to optimize final cut pro 10 in a way that they weren't able to do before on intel max and remember that apple also has the gpu the cpu the neural engine they have unified memory they have all the various system controllers that they've customized and optimized and that's not even to mention just the sheer performance of these chips have been crazy for a long time on the ipad and on the iphone so this isn't something that's like brand new so the m1 gives you four high efficiency cores and four high performance cores and it can decide when to use each set of cores depending on the task and i think it's just cool that you get an eight core cpu in a macbook air that just sounds crazy to me but that is the reality of the situation you can see better performance across the board when compared to a leading pc laptop chip now of course take that with a grain of salt because we don't know exactly what chip apple is comparing these two but benchmarks are already showing some impressive performance for the m1 so stay tuned but it's not just the cpu it's also the gpu an 8 core or 7 core in some instances gpu with again across the board better performance in the 16 core neural engine which could be extremely useful in video editing environments think about censoring or in implementing captions on the fly just so many areas you could go with that and like i was saying here's one of the very first benchmarks using geekbench for those m1 macs and you can see all three of them showcase single core performance that's better than any intel mac out there period now obviously benchmarks don't tell the whole story especially over a sustained period of time for those fanless macbook airs but nonetheless impressive what's really impressive though is that this benchmark isn't actually native it's actually running under the rosetta 2 emulator yeah you read that right it's not even a universal app and you still get performance like this that is impressive but again keep in mind benchmarks don't tell the whole story but that being said another graphics benchmark shows that the m1 chip outperforms the geforce gtx 1050 ti now i know you're thinking to yourself the 1050 ti that's old it's slow yes but remember this is an integrated gpu this is not a discrete gpu you're getting this type of performance directly from the apple m1 it makes me remember that a few years ago with the 2016 macbook pro i was looking for better gaming performance so what did i do i actually built an egpu using yes indeed a geforce gtx 1050 ti and that actually made the situation a lot better games were much more playable it wouldn't let you game at 4k at ultra settings or anything like that but it was definitely respectable folks judging from these benchmarks the m1 is giving you that type of performance in a low voltage integrated package that sips power but now let's talk about the real reason for this video we know the m1 is capable in a lot of areas but how will it do with final cut pro 10 well since i don't have an m1 mac in hand just yet i should be getting it tomorrow we're going to look at this from a slightly different angle but still you're going to see the relevancy here so i have final cut pro 10 open i have a 4k timeline and then i've imported an 8k 8192 by 4320 10 bit hevc video into this timeline and i'm running at better quality with original media playback so i haven't transcoded this h.265 8k 10 bit video at all so you can see the timeline it is completely unrendered and i'm going to just play back and you're gonna see yeah it ain't doing too well look at that frame rate it's absolutely terrible now you're probably thinking jeff what are you running this on is it a macbook air from like 10 years ago no we'll talk about what this machine is here in just a second it may surprise you but as you can see the the performance is terrible just on playback and there's no effects added to this particular clip at all it's just straight out of the camera added to the timeline it's a 4k timeline and yeah it doesn't do too well so what we're going to do here now is we're going to export this video to h.265 10 bit using a compressor setting and let's go ahead and do that right now so we'll just click the share menu i've created this compressor setting beforehand and here we go so this is going to export a 4k h.265 10 bit video so we'll go ahead and name it and save it and now we have our mr stopwatch open and we're just going to count to see how long it takes to export this 45 second clip so it's not not doing too well there it's kind of slow what type of mac is this you may be wondering oh it's just a mac pro with 28 cores 512 gigabytes of ram a w5700x gpu with 16 gigabytes of memory so it's understandable why this export is so slow why video playback on the timeline is so slow right it's absurd okay so you can see we're at three minutes and we're almost done and there we go three minutes seven seconds to export this 8k video in a 4k timeline to 4k h.265 so i'm going to go to the finder to the original media source here it is the original clip that's straight out of the camera we're going to open that up with quicktime i'm going to command i to open up the inspector we just want to confirm what we're working with here so this source video was hevc 8k 10 bit 29.97 frames per second 45 second clip so what i'm going to do now and this is why i say you should be excited for apple silicon on the mac i'm going to transfer this over to my ipad pro from 2020 with that a12z system on a chip and here it is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to import that 8k video into luma touch even though lumatouch doesn't officially support 8k it does work on a 4k timeline so here we go and look at playback it is pretty much buttery smooth 8k video on a 4k timeline on my ipad pro with apple silicon playback look at that now there's a little stutter there but now it's playing back smooth wow i mean consider the difference between this little guy right here and that decked out mac pro there's no comparison in performance crazy now the thing is you're working from an ipad pro right so you don't have final cut pro 10 you don't have the form factor of a laptop or a desktop you don't have the the peripheral or the i o capability of a mac you're missing a lot here working from an ipad pro lots of power but you just don't have the the conveniences that you would have on a mac and that's why this is so exciting because basically you're taking that apple silicon putting it into a mac with all the conveniences that come with that now in this example it's not exactly apples to apples because lumafusion doesn't support hevc 10-bit so it's going to export as an 8-bit file which is obviously going to be a lot less intense and the mac will actually handle an 8-bit hevc file with ease it'll export that quickly so really not an apples to apples comparison here so with that in mind what i've done is i've opened up imovie on my iphone 12 pro max and what i've done is i've inserted a dummy clip at the very beginning a hdr dummy clip that i shot with this phone and i do that because when imovie detects that there's an hdr clip inside it gives you the option of enabling hdr for export which is 10 bit if you don't have that hdr file and there's a dummy clip you never get the hdr option so what i've done is i included that dummy clip i put in the the 10 bit file that i exported on the mac that is in 4k because 8k is not compatible on the iphone and then i went through the export so again not apples to apples by any means but that kind of kind of makes my point is that you have a lot of restrictions a lot of things you cannot do on the iphone or on the ipad whereas you wouldn't have those type of restrictions on a full-fledged mac computer which is what makes the prospects of having the power that you have on the ipad or the iphone in this instance in a form factor and with the software of a mac having those two things combined together wow i i think we're going to see some really impressive stuff tomorrow so what do you guys think do you think i'm blowing this whole thing out of proportion do you think i'm excited over nothing do you think it's not a big deal or do you see why this is such a big deal not just because of now but because of what the future holds for mac computers with apple silicon remember this is just the very beginning can you think back to the s1 system on a chip for the original apple watch and how terribly slow that was can you think back on the apple a4 in the first ipad and then the iphone 4 compared to the a14 that we have today that's what makes this whole thing so exciting is because it's just the beginning and yet we're already seeing incredible performance metrics and we'll no doubt see even more tomorrow and in the days ahead so let me know what you guys think down below in the comments section this is jeff with nine to five mac youso the mac hardware with the apple m1 arrives tomorrow and judging from performance on other apple silicon mac fans should be extremely excited what's up everybody this is jeff benjamin with nine to five max so recently final cut pro 10 was updated as a universal application which means that it is now optimized for the m1 apple silicon inside the new macbook air macbook pro and mac mini and this hardware should allow for faster rendering better playback performance better export capability even for high quality footage like 4k prores or 8k prores and i also imagine that it will perform pretty well for more complex types of video like h.265 hevc if you've ever tried to playback one of those videos you know the mac with intel processors can struggle mightily we'll talk about that in just a little bit but here you can see some of the testing conducted that fourth bullet point which pertains to the macbook air with the eight core gpu 16 gigabytes of ram two terabyte ssd able to play two streams of 4k uhd video at the same time 24 frames per second and of course with the macbook air being thermally throttled because it doesn't have any fans the macbook pro can better handle sustained performance over a longer period of time and in apple's example they they cite using an 8k video which is impressive right being able to play 8k footage on a more or less entry-level macbook pro so given apple's recent history with chip design i think it's obvious that you should be very excited for what this new mac hardware can mean for editing videos in final cut pro 10. so again all of the new macs including the macbook pro the macbook air and the mac mini feature this apple silicon the m1 chip and that means that all the benefits of the m1 chip come to all three of these devices but the really cool thing is the vertical integration so apple makes final cut pro they make compressor they make motion they also make the operating system that these apps run on they also make the apis that talk to the hardware and of course with these new macs they make the most important part of the whole equation and that is the silicon the system on a chip the apple m1 and really no other pc manufacturer can compete with this top to bottom vertical integration that apple has because of its prowess with design so what this means is that apple is able to optimize final cut pro 10 in a way that they weren't able to do before on intel max and remember that apple also has the gpu the cpu the neural engine they have unified memory they have all the various system controllers that they've customized and optimized and that's not even to mention just the sheer performance of these chips have been crazy for a long time on the ipad and on the iphone so this isn't something that's like brand new so the m1 gives you four high efficiency cores and four high performance cores and it can decide when to use each set of cores depending on the task and i think it's just cool that you get an eight core cpu in a macbook air that just sounds crazy to me but that is the reality of the situation you can see better performance across the board when compared to a leading pc laptop chip now of course take that with a grain of salt because we don't know exactly what chip apple is comparing these two but benchmarks are already showing some impressive performance for the m1 so stay tuned but it's not just the cpu it's also the gpu an 8 core or 7 core in some instances gpu with again across the board better performance in the 16 core neural engine which could be extremely useful in video editing environments think about censoring or in implementing captions on the fly just so many areas you could go with that and like i was saying here's one of the very first benchmarks using geekbench for those m1 macs and you can see all three of them showcase single core performance that's better than any intel mac out there period now obviously benchmarks don't tell the whole story especially over a sustained period of time for those fanless macbook airs but nonetheless impressive what's really impressive though is that this benchmark isn't actually native it's actually running under the rosetta 2 emulator yeah you read that right it's not even a universal app and you still get performance like this that is impressive but again keep in mind benchmarks don't tell the whole story but that being said another graphics benchmark shows that the m1 chip outperforms the geforce gtx 1050 ti now i know you're thinking to yourself the 1050 ti that's old it's slow yes but remember this is an integrated gpu this is not a discrete gpu you're getting this type of performance directly from the apple m1 it makes me remember that a few years ago with the 2016 macbook pro i was looking for better gaming performance so what did i do i actually built an egpu using yes indeed a geforce gtx 1050 ti and that actually made the situation a lot better games were much more playable it wouldn't let you game at 4k at ultra settings or anything like that but it was definitely respectable folks judging from these benchmarks the m1 is giving you that type of performance in a low voltage integrated package that sips power but now let's talk about the real reason for this video we know the m1 is capable in a lot of areas but how will it do with final cut pro 10 well since i don't have an m1 mac in hand just yet i should be getting it tomorrow we're going to look at this from a slightly different angle but still you're going to see the relevancy here so i have final cut pro 10 open i have a 4k timeline and then i've imported an 8k 8192 by 4320 10 bit hevc video into this timeline and i'm running at better quality with original media playback so i haven't transcoded this h.265 8k 10 bit video at all so you can see the timeline it is completely unrendered and i'm going to just play back and you're gonna see yeah it ain't doing too well look at that frame rate it's absolutely terrible now you're probably thinking jeff what are you running this on is it a macbook air from like 10 years ago no we'll talk about what this machine is here in just a second it may surprise you but as you can see the the performance is terrible just on playback and there's no effects added to this particular clip at all it's just straight out of the camera added to the timeline it's a 4k timeline and yeah it doesn't do too well so what we're going to do here now is we're going to export this video to h.265 10 bit using a compressor setting and let's go ahead and do that right now so we'll just click the share menu i've created this compressor setting beforehand and here we go so this is going to export a 4k h.265 10 bit video so we'll go ahead and name it and save it and now we have our mr stopwatch open and we're just going to count to see how long it takes to export this 45 second clip so it's not not doing too well there it's kind of slow what type of mac is this you may be wondering oh it's just a mac pro with 28 cores 512 gigabytes of ram a w5700x gpu with 16 gigabytes of memory so it's understandable why this export is so slow why video playback on the timeline is so slow right it's absurd okay so you can see we're at three minutes and we're almost done and there we go three minutes seven seconds to export this 8k video in a 4k timeline to 4k h.265 so i'm going to go to the finder to the original media source here it is the original clip that's straight out of the camera we're going to open that up with quicktime i'm going to command i to open up the inspector we just want to confirm what we're working with here so this source video was hevc 8k 10 bit 29.97 frames per second 45 second clip so what i'm going to do now and this is why i say you should be excited for apple silicon on the mac i'm going to transfer this over to my ipad pro from 2020 with that a12z system on a chip and here it is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to import that 8k video into luma touch even though lumatouch doesn't officially support 8k it does work on a 4k timeline so here we go and look at playback it is pretty much buttery smooth 8k video on a 4k timeline on my ipad pro with apple silicon playback look at that now there's a little stutter there but now it's playing back smooth wow i mean consider the difference between this little guy right here and that decked out mac pro there's no comparison in performance crazy now the thing is you're working from an ipad pro right so you don't have final cut pro 10 you don't have the form factor of a laptop or a desktop you don't have the the peripheral or the i o capability of a mac you're missing a lot here working from an ipad pro lots of power but you just don't have the the conveniences that you would have on a mac and that's why this is so exciting because basically you're taking that apple silicon putting it into a mac with all the conveniences that come with that now in this example it's not exactly apples to apples because lumafusion doesn't support hevc 10-bit so it's going to export as an 8-bit file which is obviously going to be a lot less intense and the mac will actually handle an 8-bit hevc file with ease it'll export that quickly so really not an apples to apples comparison here so with that in mind what i've done is i've opened up imovie on my iphone 12 pro max and what i've done is i've inserted a dummy clip at the very beginning a hdr dummy clip that i shot with this phone and i do that because when imovie detects that there's an hdr clip inside it gives you the option of enabling hdr for export which is 10 bit if you don't have that hdr file and there's a dummy clip you never get the hdr option so what i've done is i included that dummy clip i put in the the 10 bit file that i exported on the mac that is in 4k because 8k is not compatible on the iphone and then i went through the export so again not apples to apples by any means but that kind of kind of makes my point is that you have a lot of restrictions a lot of things you cannot do on the iphone or on the ipad whereas you wouldn't have those type of restrictions on a full-fledged mac computer which is what makes the prospects of having the power that you have on the ipad or the iphone in this instance in a form factor and with the software of a mac having those two things combined together wow i i think we're going to see some really impressive stuff tomorrow so what do you guys think do you think i'm blowing this whole thing out of proportion do you think i'm excited over nothing do you think it's not a big deal or do you see why this is such a big deal not just because of now but because of what the future holds for mac computers with apple silicon remember this is just the very beginning can you think back to the s1 system on a chip for the original apple watch and how terribly slow that was can you think back on the apple a4 in the first ipad and then the iphone 4 compared to the a14 that we have today that's what makes this whole thing so exciting is because it's just the beginning and yet we're already seeing incredible performance metrics and we'll no doubt see even more tomorrow and in the days ahead so let me know what you guys think down below in the comments section this is jeff with nine to five mac you\n"