I think by narrowing it down to those two options, you are now safe from making an expensive mistake because they’re not very different. It’s more difficult to predict exactly how much the spec differences between those two options would actually affect your work, but I’ll make some suggestions.
If it’s a priority to have background rendering in Media Encoder while smoothly editing in the foreground, my guess is that the M4 Max would be preferable. The reasoning for that is Premiere Pro and Media Encoder use GPU acceleration and the Media Engine while encoding, and the Max has 8 more GPU cores and one more Media Enginer than the Pro. Those differences could help Media Encoder render more quickly and efficiently, hopefully leaving more resources available for animating. But there is also the question of whether 36GB is enough Unified Memory.
To help settle that, you might try keeping Activity Monitor open as you do your typical workload on your current Mac, watching these two things specifically:
In the Memory tab, watch the Memory Pressure graph. If the graph is always or mostly green, that means the 16GB can handle most of your current workload, making it easier to recommend the M4 Max option because its 36GB will be enough. However, if the Memory Pressure graph is always orange or red, then 16GB is clearly too little memory; 36GB might be enough but 48GB might be safer.
Also, keep these Activity Monitor windows open: Window > CPU History, and Window > GPU History. Watch them when you are rendering in the background and animating in the foreground, especially GPU History. See how GPU usage changes as you work. Watch GPU usage when rendering in Media Encoder without animating, and also when animating while not rendering in Media Encoder.
The purpose of those tests would be to see whether Unified Memory or GPU cores are the bigger bottleneck on the current Mac, which can help you decide what to do:
- If both are not a problem, the M4 Pro is fine.
- If Memory Pressure is overloaded but GPU History is not, the M4 Pro is preferable because it has more unified memory.
- If Memory Pressure is usually OK but GPU History is frequently maxed out during the most demanding periods, and rendering or animation seem too slow when done together, then the M4 Max is preferable because of the additional Media Engine and GPU cores.
I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is for software like Premiere Pro/Media Encoder that can use a Mac’s CPU, GPU, and Media Engine, during rendering, the more it can use the Media Engine the lighter the burden on the GPU, and the more it can use the GPU the lighter the burden on the CPU.
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