I’ve always been a PC fan, even when other content creators waved around. I’ll mention up front that I don’t game, so everything I do on my laptop revolves around video editing. To deal with this, I use a high-end Windows desktop machine at home and until recently had one A laptop for video editing on the go.
Then the Aero 15X died. The keyboard stopped working and the Lightning port failed. I didn’t really mourn the loss, it was always loud and hot. Battery life wasn’t great at all, and to do any serious video work, I had to plug it into a comically large and heavy power cube.
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Apple’s MacBook Pro M3 Pro is a great content creation machine.
It was time to buy a new laptop, but I had no intention of reliving my Gigabyte experience. Instead, I wanted a lightweight, powerful, great-looking computer with a long battery life. I needed to edit 4K video on DaVinci Resolve while doing color correction, as well as adding effects and titles. I also edit RAW images, so I’ll use Photoshop and Lightroom regularly as well.
He appointed A But I figured it would be very expensive. After checking, I was surprised to find that the gap between the price of A A Windows laptop with similar performance has been lower since Apple started using its own silicon.
So I took the leap and bought a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip (12-core CPU and 18-core GPU), 36GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. From what I’ve read, that should be enough to handle difficult mods. I paid $3100 in Canada including tax, and the same machine sold for about $200 less in the US.
I had my new MacBook turned on right away when I created a video review of the Nikon Z8 while in Vancouver. Later, I edited a review of the Fujifilm X100 VI in London and did a hands-on video of the Panasonic S9 from Japan. These projects gave me a good feel for the MacBook’s performance, battery life, and ease of use while on the road.
While I was home, I was curious to compare my MacBook to my desktop computer. Although it’s not the latest model, the latter still has impressive specifications with a 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900 CPU, NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPU, and 64GB of RAM.
I use mirrorless cameras like the Canon EOS R6 II and Panasonic’s S5 II, which produce up to 6K 10-bit 4:2:2 Log H.264 or H.265 Quicktime files. These formats are usually taxing on your computer’s processor and GPU, so I wasn’t expecting real-time playback.
However, I noticed that I could play these video files smoothly in DaVinci Resolve on my MacBook Pro without the need for rendering or conversion. I couldn’t do it on my decent specs desktop computer, so what was happening?
It turns out that even modern NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can’t decode many of those commonly used formats in real time, says systems integrator Puget Systems. newly. This can be done with some formats (not H.264) on newer Intel CPUs with Quick Sync in DaVinci Resolve 18 Studio or later.
Being able to edit these files directly from the camera was a huge quality of life improvement, removing the time-wasting and storage step.
I’ve also seen real-time playback on my Mac in most conditions without display. This includes sequences with 6K and 8K video, color correction on most clips, titles, multilayering, optical flow time distortion, and stabilization.
In contrast, my high-end desktop computer requires not only my video files to be converted, but also timeline viewing enabled, especially with 6K or 8K video. Both of these things take time and can consume hundreds of gigabytes of disk space.
While MacBook Poetry Quickly, I also wanted to see how it compared to my Windows machine more objectively. I used the PugetBench Creator benchmark suite, which compares performance between devices in commonly used creator apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Davinci Resolve.
Considering that my computer wasn’t doing very well when it came to video editing, the results surprised me. The MacBook Pro M3 came in first in our Photoshop tests, with an overall score of 10,076 compared to 7,599 for my desktop computer. This is largely due to the M3’s superior processor.
However, my PC outperformed the MacBook Pro in video editing by a very large margin, thanks to its faster GPU. The Apple device earned an overall score of 4,754 on the Premiere Pro PugetBench tests in high power mode, while my PC reached 8,763.
There are no public PugetBench tests yet for DaVinci Resolve, however It shows that high-end PCs easily outperform high-end MacBook Pro models on this application. The PC is generally better when working in RAW formats and easily outperforms the MacBook Pro in terms of GPU effects, AI features, and H.264 and H.265 encoding.
These results show that the standards do not paint a complete picture. The relative power of a computer depends on what you do with it, and in my case, the ability to edit certain video formats without rendering them trumps pure speed. However, people who use more effects or work in ProRes or RAW formats may be better off with a powerful computer.
However, a lot of the things I hated about my Windows laptop had nothing to do with performance. I’ve often been annoyed by my Aero 15X’s weight (if you include the power brick), heat, noise, build quality, and relatively useless trackpad.
Since I bought the MacBook Pro 16, I’ve never felt like it got too hot and fans rarely interacted with it, even during video editing. By contrast, there isn’t a single Windows PC I’ve heard of that doesn’t generate excess heat and fan noise under intense loads.
Another major advantage of the MacBook is that it offers the same performance whether plugged in or not, but the same can’t be said for most computers. Many of them throttle when disconnected from the power supply, significantly reducing performance.
If you need to edit on the go and don’t have access to AC power, the MacBook wins here too. While editing with DaVinci Resolve, it can take three to four hours on battery power alone, which is three times what a Gigabyte laptop can do. The MacBook Pro takes just 1.5 hours to fully charge, compared to about 1.5 hours For Dell XPS 17 9730. It charges faster too.
It’s also less of a hassle to tow than my Aero, as it weighs less and the charger is much lighter too. Finally, the trackpad is so much better, that I can edit videos without a mouse, which is something I could never say with the Aero or any other laptop I own.
It’s not all perfect, because I don’t like the webcam hole, but other than that the MacBook Pro 16 M3 is perfect. As it stands now, Windows laptops using Intel and AMD processors may be able to match performance, but they lag far behind in terms of efficiency. This may change with Or NVIDIA’s upcoming 5000-series GPUs, but for now, Apple’s products are hard to beat for traveling content creators like me.