Also keyframe handling are fiddly. Several years-long unresolved usability issues are in the forum like keyboard-selecting transitions etc.. The support forum is full of annoyances but BMD has mostly other priorities. I rarely complain as Resolve is still better than the rest for me
The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7).
Rendering HDR video was around 12fps there on the i5 - the same project in the Mac mini gets 60fps.
The M4 10 core GPU seems on par or better with a mobile RTX3060(65W) for video tests (NR / Deflicker) so I'm also impressed about the M4's efficiency. A lot of power per Watt.
It's becoming a dedicated video rendering machine for me where all the SMB auto mounting issues with macOS seem solvable. Pretty happy so far with the base model price even in the EU. The power button placement is an annoyance for me, though.
When do you turn it off? I have a Mac M1 Studio and I just let it sleep. If things get weird I reboot. I think I recall using the power button about a year ago after returning from vacation after I had shut it down.
Right now I mount up to 7 HDDs to the Mac via SMB, have some Streamdeck / Pedal and the necessary external SSDs for fast storage connected. I will see if the SMB mounts come back OK after sleep (my laptop acts as server) but the Streamdeck and HDDs wake up randomly so overall it's easier to switch everything on and off depending on usage.
Everyone keeps citing idle, which is when the device is on and active but not particularly doing anything.
The standby power draw is 1W or less. I've used Mac Minis for years -- just replaced my M1 with an M4, though the M1 left me wanting for nothing -- and the number of times I've interacted with the power button is so negligible I imagine I've gone over a year without touching it. When I haven't touched it in a while it goes to standby, waking instantly when I engage it again.
Not everyone lives the same way. I am seriously considering a Mac Mini as my next upgrade yet I live in a RV and move frequently. Are there ways that I can keep the Mac mini powered while traveling.. sure, but why would/should I?
Are you not turning off entire circuits to reduce power draw when mobile? I’m actually thinking about one of these for my truck camper and its power draw seems fine, but the stumbling point for me is the additional power draw from the monitor it would require. I think I’m leaning toward an M4 MBP with nano textured screen for maximum power efficiency and ability to work outside when it’s nice, though I have not yet put much effort into researching efficient monitors
My EU mind is blown by these claims. Let’s take the lowest(1W) at sleep mode. With a thousand mac minis at sleep mode, that is already 1kW! In my country, a single person household’s yearly electricity package comes at 1400kW(+100 depending on provider) per year.
Note: intentionally keeping it simple, please don’t nitpick.
No household uses 1400kW, and kW/year doesn't make sense. Do you mean 1400kWh/year? That seems pretty low (NZ is 7000kWh/year), but if so, you're comparing power to energy, which doesn't mean much. 1W 24/7 < 9kWh/year, which is pretty small.
Personal guess from a fellow European citizen: I think they meant to say 1700 kWh/year. According to most German power utilities, the average 2-person household consumes about 2400 kWh/year.
Not really. Unlike previous mac mini models, the grille on the underside is both the air intake and exhaust. If anything it ought to be better upside-down, since convection now helps the heated air rise out.
It would make it fill up with dust, even while idle. Also, and fluid spill would be much more likely to cause damage.
The normal orientation is fine for most people who want things to be as simple as possible (ie, most Mac users). There is very little reason to ever turn it off. If you still do that frequently for some reason, just leave it in a locatino where the button is still easy to access.
The case is also going to radiate heat and turning it upside down will make that less efficient. The base won't radiate heat in the same due to being plastic and due to it already being used to pass air through.
The case isn't thermally connected to the SoC in any direct way, so while I'm sure it does radiate some heat, I think it's pretty negligible. The PSU sits at the "top" (in regular orientation), and I don't think it runs much of a risk of overheating.
I just arranged a selection of 4K H.264/H.265 clips in a 2x2 grid on a 8K timeline in DaVinci Resolve.
Playback works well - up to 60fps. However, export to H.265 creates a lot of Swap. Rendering went with 15-18fps. All videos on a SMB network drive but the GPU was the bottleneck for rendering.
Swap was even around 24GB with 5 videos which I tested first. Using 4x4K it went 9 GB before stabilizing at around 2GB. No effects or grading whatsoever - plain 4K60 SDR videos.
One single SDR 4K clip renders to 8K at 25fps. Using Superscale 2x makes that 0.5-1fps.
For 8K rendering you may be better off with 32GB RAM minimum or trying the M4 Pro model maybe with 24GB. For 4K/6K editing the base 16/256 M4 Mac mini seems sufficient when all video storage will be on external drives or network.
thanks for checking! I think I'll get the M4 Pro and max out the RAM. I don't have the budget for whatever the future M4 Studio would look like, so this seems like a nice sweet spot.
I had a few OFX plugins and maybe had the browser running which may have impacted RAM. Depending on how much RAM you can keep free and the amount of grading on that 8K video you may be OK with the 24GB of the M4 Pro base model but yeah - more is always better though with Apple it's painful to add more of anything .. on a budget.
>The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7).
You could pick a variety of non Apple CPUs that easily deliver 4-5x the performance of an 11th gen i5. Maybe don't be disingenous and compare the M4 to a more recent CPU like i5-14600K, which is also 4x the performance. I'm not comparing on power efficiency, since that was not mentioned at all as part of your comment.
So i5-14600K is 1.57x on multi-core, slightly worse on single-core. $235 for the CPU versus $599 for a whole system. Could maybe match the total price, but Intel won't be able to come anywhere close on the power efficiency.
The 120GB/s memory bandwidth of the unified memory helps especially with video, I guess. The M4 CPU isn't really stressed out most of the time. Only multicam and HLG conversations it maxes out.
Once I patched my old Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support yet the iGPU of the i5 1135-g7 had similar GPU performance for video as the Intel Arc A380 in the desktop PC. The old PCIe3 speed limited its performance. I heard others reported a smoother replay experience with Apple silicon compared to even a RTX4090.
I get some delays when fast scrubbing through a 9 multicam 720p timeline and just 360p proxies. Still impressed compared to what I was used to. Video editors may be surprised about the performance for the price.
There is a Github project [1] which has detailed instructions. The ancient i5-3570 only allowed 2GB ReBAR, BTW. GPU-Z says ReBAR / 4G is activated and working, Intel Arc Driver does not see it but seems to use it. Some part of the BIOS had to be manually fixed, AFAIR.
The PC was given for free, the CPU €11 yet overall I wouldn't recommend the process just for the result. It's only little benefit, if at all, though fun. On that occasion I also added some NVMe driver which works well, demonstrated for the similar Dell Optiplex [2][3]..
4x vs. the old i5, not the M4. They are trying to say that comparing to a CPU released four years ago is pointless because the newer CPU is obviously much better.
It's not disingenuous to do a real-world comparison to a system you already own when stating the specs. It's actually much more useful to hear these real world anecdotes than to look at geekbench numbers.
I expected a fast M4 package but still was mind blown to see the video editing performance. After all these video renders run for many hours.
My 2 year old i5 laptop - even with 64GB RAM and 2x2TB SSDs upgrades - was around the same price like the base M4 Mac mini / uses similar Power. The PC surely is way more versatile with these specs and expandability.
Staying mostly in X86-land due to affordable RAM & storage, nothing I currently have comes close to the M4 performance per Watt - and now even performance per $/€ - in my video-editing use case.
It's comparing apples to oranges. If you want to compare computers, compare a macbook with an old i5 to your laptop with an old i5. Comparing an M4 to an old i5 is just silly. Of course it's going to be faster.
It's a comparison of two CPU/iGPU combos I have on my desk with similar power draw. Those iGPUs are most power efficient for video editing as I like QuickSync from Intel.
The i5-1135G7 (17W TDP) has 2 Media Engines which I use for proxy generation in parallel for example and pretty versatile so I use it daily (64GB RAM..).
Still, I think it's a notable achievement to get 4x performance with the M4 for video at similar wattage of the i5. I don't have an M4 MacBook but I guess the M4 would perform similar to the one in the Mac mini.
Thanks for making the dataset available. As I recorded several city walks with multiple cameras simultaneously (usually 3-6 Osmo Pocket in 4K60) I'd like to create Gaussian splatting datasets from many such walks. What costs and hardware requirements can be expected for city-wide GS datasets like the one of Prague?
I'm wondering if I can create them myself or should donate the many TB of multicam recordings.
There are many YouTube channels walking through cities as the movement and sound add more to the atmosphere than street-view like experiences. I also happen to cover Prague many times like [1] in 2020 without many tourists.
One thing I started a few years is multicam walks. This means that I carry some 4-6 Osmo Pockets to actually film in several directions simultaneaously - example: Dresden [2].
The editing process is taking multiple hours so I have hundreds of unreleased recordings. If someone has a hint on AI assisted multicam editing, where to start (like better gaze prediction etc. from VR) I'd be interested - especially feeding all camera streams and let a NN decide the best camera angle and cuts to be between 4-11s?
Hey I have been working on some ideas in the same vein for a bit. Taking input as videos and extracting the most interesting parts out of it.
I can try testing it out on your footage. If it works, you can incorporate it in your pipeline as well :)
Drop me a mail if you're interested (luzenmictlan (at) gmail)
Is it possible to stitch your footage into a 360 projection? If so, you could definitely upload it as either 180 or 360 degree video, which would allow for VR use cases as well.
I guess 180 would work. There is 360/VR content on YouTube yet it seems not mainstream yet. I also have a 360° cam that I rarely use. BTW, half of all my viewers watch this type of content on TV according to the stats.
I guess subtitles, HDR and decent editing are more important for now so I'm looking for AI help in the editing part. Subtitles are already supported by GPTs
The last time I visited Moldova was in February 2020. Recorded some walks there:
[1][2].
I also went several times since 2010. There were good connections towards Odessa which I loved during summer and Chisinau had OK flight connections.
Transnistria was more interesting back in 2018 when it was like being transported into a 1980's Russian province city. It was super cheap there actually.
Current I publish 2 walking videos per week on YouTube [1] also with a GPX Animation in the intro. For the GPX track I currently use the free GPX Animator [1] with some scripting of the CLI args.
I have experimented also with Mapbox and Remotion and could get nicer results than GPX Animator but it's not even worth the render time. Same for Google Earth Studio - it's just too slow as I often create batches of 5-6 videos per day. How long does one 20s video take to render - 4K60?
One thing I'd love to have is not just the GPX track but photos or video snippets popping up geo-located - maybe even info boxes for more than just a moving line. This could be coming from Wikipedia etc or some custom JSON data. There is potential to improve map animations but I can't see how I would recoup the cost per video. For me it would be worth less than $0.50 per video on my volume of 100+ videos per year. The web interface and video looks nice though the pricing is out of reach.
I wish you success and maybe there really is a market for premium priced GPX Animations. For me personally this could only work as a standalone app in the $30-$50 price range only.
I like the idea of the snippets popping out along the way. I would clearly use it for my website (https://trekstories.c100k.eu).
Another good use case I see, is for race organizers to showcase the route on their website. That would look more modern compared to the usual low-res screenshot. Something like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5GjuRS9sVA
Fantastic feedback, thanks! Yeah, I am still figuring things out and your response gives me some perspective of how the videos might be used as well.
Regarding rendering time: 20s at 4k60 takes around 6 minutes. There is, highly likely, a way to make this more performant but it's not on the priority list at this moment.
As user pmdfgy mentioned, outdoor events is exactly the market I am focusing right now: Marathons, bike or trails races. Most of them have a simple map of their race, if at all, and when it comes to more extreme races like running or cycling in the mountains I'd like to see a preview of what I am getting into as a participant.
One of my first users, the Vietnam Mountain Trail Series, uses it to visualize their races like the Vietnam Mountain Marathon. They've put it on their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5GMPNfEDbU
Nice project! It may be useful to select the included places also by QRank of Wikidata [1] so notable islands will appear, despite low populations. An SQLite DB of QRank [2] was also posted here in HN a while ago.
(Saving people a click for link#1: qrank sorts Wikidata entries by their pageviews across Wikipedia, Wikiquotes, Wikibooks, etc.)
I'm not sure that an online popularity contest should be the input for a base map. I understand the reasoning that they're more likely to be viewed by someone, but it's also a bubble: is Wikipedia / are Wikimedia projects as popular in Asia as this base map will be? Is that used for the same purpose as this base map? Should something be shown on a map when there's a lot of drama about it rather than because a lot of people live there?
I see the advantages also, like if literally nobody lives there but it's an interesting or large landmass then there's cause for it to be included. I just don't think this is the right (objective, fairest) importance measure to use
qrank is not a mere popularity contest and definitely not a more arbitrary measure of importance than the count of population within city boundaries (boundaries can be arbitrary; population vs commuters vs tourists; regional capitals etc.)
> I just don't think this is the right (objective, fairest) importance measure to use
What's "right" can depend on the purpose of the map.
- Some DaVinci Resolve Settings to use on SDR monitors: https://youtu.be/4izJfgRtkZE (though I upload 4K60 HDR at 37.5Mbit) which is enough for me slow content.
This only allows a single LUT for the entire video. For comparison, Resolve will perform Dolby Vision tone mapping from HDR to SDR on a clip-by-clip basis.
I'm also glad that Rambalac is back as he quit a few months ago. I've recently also started uploading 4K60 HDR content to YouTube [1] and it takes up to one week more time for them to encode than the SDR version. You can include your own LUT instead of YouTube conversion which seems to help. Here's an article and LUT [2] + a video [3] with valuable info. They allowed me getting DJI Pocket 3 HLG recordings to HDR10.
Here is another Dell story:
Bought a Inspiron 7610 (16plus w/ 32GB RAM) in November 2021:
1. laptop switches on every night at 4:28 despite contrary BIOS settings. It took me 1 month of remote service and messages to get to some undocumented reset instructions
2. In high performance profile the laptop overheats. Service finally approved after I took video. Service changes the mainboard but forgets to insert the 2nd 16GB RAM stick!
3. Had to open/photograph the laptop to prove. Forgotten 16GB RAM gets delivered but doesn't work with the device - BSOD's on boot. Clear faul of the stick as it works with only the original RAM
4. Device gets picked up yet again (unannounced), UPS tracking says delivered and -- is lost since then.
5. Refund request issued (Sept 9) but denied.
Since early August I'm trying to get a refund or replacement - for several months now with endless chat messages and some phone calls where nobody helps but waits for the "internal team". The standard apology text snippet was issued dozens of times, I've heard at least 3 times "please give us another chance" - I should wait another 24,48 or 72h but no update.
Just off a phone call with them again today I am left with an infuriating customer support when something goes wrong on their side and no laptop I paid for. I hear from other that going after them with lawyers also takes many months.
