Upgrading My Apple Mac Mini. Will It Be Good Enough?

[Mile50BA]

Hello Community,

I've been having serious problems with lag, choppy playback in Premiere Pro making my editing challenging. I'm not a pro editor, but pretty comfortable in what I do. I've been editing a music video that's 5 minutes in length, 1920x1080 two different cameras (Sony and Canon), 4K footage with a RED Camera, plus over 200 random videos with different frame rates and mostly 1920x1080. Sequence is 1920x1080.

Current Setup:

Premeire Pro 15.2

Mac Mini

OS Mojave

2.6 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory 8GB

Graphics Intel Iris 1536 MB

Even with proxies, playback is weak, delaying my editing big time. I loaded up a film I did too, just under an hour, it couldn't get through at all.

I want to stick with Apple, specifically Mac Mini (Brand New) because I love its portability. The upgrade I'm thinking about is:

Mac Mini

Apple M1 Chip with 8-Core CPU

8-Core GPU

Memory 16GB (unfortunatelly Apple doesn't offer 32GB in this model)
256 GB Storage ( I use external HDs for my projects)

Will this be an optimum step up from my six year old setup? Will it solve any playback issues? Will I have issues with 4K footage?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Kartika Rawat]

Hi there!

Thanks for writing in. Playback issues depend on several factors. System specifications are one of them.

You can refer to this article for Premiere Pro system requirements: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/user-guide.html/premiere-pro/system-requirements.ug.html

Let us know if you have any questions.

Kartika

[Mile50BA]

Thanksfor your feedback Kartika,

I went ahead and upgraded my system with the above specs. After lots of research and questions answered, it should be sufficient.

[RjL190365]

It would also be a big improvement over your current Mac Mini:

Your current Mac Mini is not only old (it dates from 2014), but it also uses only a Haswell-generation mobile (not even desktop) low-power dual-core i5 CPU. And no dual-core CPU, not even with hyper-threading, is as powerful as even a mediocre true quad-core CPU from the same generation or even two generations older than that.

And since this generation of Mac Mini continued to be produced until about 2016 or 2017, Apple support for that generation is expected to be depreciated to "Vintage" status within the next year or so.

[Mile50BA]

Thanks for the feedback RjL190365, I feel even more assured.

Naturally, one needs to update their system at some point, so I'm looking forward to my new system. Being how Apple creates and markets products the way they do, its too bad that these mac mini's are not offered with an option upto 32GB memory or higher, only to 16GB. Only the top line mac mini offers that possibility.