Required Mac Specifications for Smooth Media Intelligence Search Performance

[Daniel256435188b02]

I have over 100 episodes of 20-minute 1080p .mxf footage and plan to use a media intelligence search tool.

My current 2017 iMac (i5, 32GB RAM) struggles even with just 30 short MP4 clips (30 seconds to 2 minutes) when using the tool — it constantly shows a “memory running out” warning.

What specs would you recommend for smooth, AI-assisted processing of large .mxf files?

I’m considering a MacBook Pro M4 Max with 128GB of RAM, but I’m not sure if that’s sufficient.

[caroline_edits]

Hey Daniel, cool to hear you're upgrading your setup. A new computer always feels good. My first instinct is that the M4 with 128GB would be plenty of hardware power to do what you're wanting to do.

Keep an eye on the thread, I'm sure some more people will share their opinions.

Best of luck!

Caroline

[Daniel256435188b02]

Thank you for the answers, Caroline! 

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey · Accepted solution]

Hi Daniel,

As Caroline suggested, M4 MAX should give a substantial jump in processing power over your current system.

In general, faster storage & GPU with hardware decode support will help in getting faster analysis. You may refer to this link to learn more about Media Intelligence. Also, here is an article by Puget Systems on getting optimal performance with Media Intelligence. Hope it helps.

Thanks.

Sumeet

[Daniel256435188b02]

Thank you so much for the information, Summet. It was really helpful!

[Conrad_C]

Hey Daniel, cool to hear you're upgrading your setup. A new computer always feels good. My first instinct is that the M4 with 128GB would be plenty of hardware power to do what you're wanting to do.

By @caroline_edits

Can you expand with some more detail on how the 128GB would contribute to Media Intelligence performance?

The reason I ask is that in the Puget Systems link that Sumeet Kumar Choubey posted, Puget Systems doesn’t mention memory at all, and instead claims that “the primary bottleneck for Media Intelligence is how fast your system can decode the footage” as well as “codec choice.” Additionally, in the Task Manager screen shot on the Puget Systems page, it shows that only 28% of the 64GB of RAM is being used on their test hardware. So going by their tests, even 64GB was almost 4x more memory than what was actually needed. This calls into question why 128GB of RAM would improve Media Intelligence at all. Would memory usage vary significantly based on the codec, bit depth, frame size, subsampling, etc?

[Peru Bob]

Moved from the Premiere Pro forum to the Video Hardware forum.