I replaced my $10,000 iMac Pro with a base model 24" M1 iMac for video editing!

In today's

video

, I'm going to replace my ten thousand dollar

imac

pro with this

base

model

24 inch

imac

m1 that costs 1300. The imac pro has been a workstation for me, producing almost all of the

video

s on this channel for about a year. It's been around for a year and a half now, but today it's going to take a backseat to the cheapest imac m1 that money can buy, so the big question is whether this has the chops, whether you're buying the new imac m1 or waiting to upgrade from your old Windows device make sure your digital life is protected with current sponsor total av total av is an award-winning antivirus and malware detection service with advanced protection against hackers and online scams, like those websites endlessly irritating phishing that you know every time you visit download a YouTube video, there are 700 different ads telling you to download a new update for Adobe Flash Player, even though Adobe Flash Player no longer exists, yes, that kind of thing is against that Total Av protects.

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Join me right after I just finished filming the video with that guy, the imac

base

model

, and here's my exact model. The opposite of a base model imac, this is basically the most expensive imac you can buy and I will basically try to trade them in so this is my 18 core imac pro and when it was new it would have cost over ten grand. I bought it from the second owner of this for half, a little over five thousand dollars, which is still a lot of money, but 10 grand is a lot for an imac and this isn't even three years old and I'm going to try to do it. use a thirteen hundred dollar base model to replace it now obviously i don't expect the imac m1 to perform at the same level as this one that would be crazy it's basically the top of the line imac the most powerful you can buy it has the 18 xeon w2191b cores 128 gigabytes of ddr4 266 megahertz ram two terabytes of storage and maxed out vega 64 graphics with 16 gigabytes of hbm2 vram when new including apple care this would have cost 11k so let me know in the comments below .

I think I paid a fair price for a machine with these specs in 2019. I think I did, but today I'm replacing it with this, the cheapest imac m1 you can buy right now. I know what you're thinking. Luke, that's a small step down, don't you think you're going from 128 to 8 gigabytes of RAM and an eighth of the storage? But I'm actually not too worried about having less storage because I edit in an external raid. I have this 48 terabyte Thunderbolt drive that I plug in and that's where all my videos are stored, so it really won't make any difference.

I'm simply connecting it to something else, although I admit my big concern is that by connecting the storage I need to do my work, I use 50 percent of the imac m1's ports. Also, I don't have an SD card slot and yeah, it's going to be interesting, so why not just? Go ahead and change these things and I'll start

editing

the video that you've already seen, so okay, we're here about seven minutes into the video and I'm starting to bring the m1 to its knees. there's a lot of layers going on here so if we go down to the timeline, by the way, this is all unrendered footage or actually you can see the rendering is catching up because it's really really fast, but we have my 4k base footage and then we have 4k accelerated footage from cinebench that has a gaussian blur applied and then on top of that we have a graphic that has a drop shadow and there are transitions between them and just with that I'm starting To lose frames here you can see that the head Playback skips and we're dropping some frames, but there's a lot going on and it's starting to have problems and there's no fan.

This is really impressive, so after

editing

the first imac video, then working on the ipad pro video you saw on Saturday, well, I accidentally recorded the end of my ipad pro video at 60fps. Now usually once I go ahead and apply my color correction on the imac pro it stops abruptly. and playback is basically nothing oh my god I'm not dropping frames at 60fps 4k and look at this guys this is the exact same settings I use on my imac pro better performance optimized original what the hell is this? sense, it doesn't make any sense and after that I worked on the imac versus imac comparison that you saw on Sunday.

I have now edited my last three main videos on the base model 24 inch imac and I have to say I am amazed. It's really amazing that I was able to do so many things on a much cheaper machine than my imac pro. If you look at the new purchase price of both machines, this guy is like a tenth of the price and I honestly didn't feel it. about a tenth of the computer, but obviously, given the huge disparities between these two imacs, there were areas where the difference was noticeable. The first thing was the RAM. After digging into a video I definitely started to notice the RAM being stretched quite a bit, it's not uncommon that my RAM usage is up to 90 gigabytes on the imac pro when editing in the final cut and here I am trying to get by with only eight All in all, another area where I noticed the m1's limitations were in the rendering and export types of the final cut. extremely well optimized for Apple Silicon, but it's hard to beat the raw power of 18 cores and a beefy GPU.

There is also a bug that I have encountered not only on this particular imac but on all the m1 devices I have tested and it is really annoying, inexplicably. Out of nowhere the audio just stops playing, you can see I can turn up the volume, it's not muted, I just have no audio, it fixes itself after a while or I can go ahead and exit an end cut and then open it. again, which by the way is ridiculously fast to open this library and then the audio comes back. It's worth noting that it took a while but that happens a few times when editing a video and it's really irritating.

I'm curious if you are a final cut pro user and use a mac m1, have you noticed this issue? If so, how often does it happen and how is it fixed? I haven't found a reliable way to fix it every time other than restarting final cut pro. It's clearly a software issue, but Apple really needs to get to work, putting that annoyance aside. The craziest part of this whole experiment was the excellent timeline performance. It was actually better than the Imac Pro. I really can't believe it. I went from one place to another. to make sure I had everything standardized and yes I can't explain it but to give you an idea of ​​how crazy it was let's go over some benchmarks comparing these two devices it's going to be a bloodbath starting with cinebench r23 the m1 just can't compete with the large number of cores, the same applies in geekbench and in geekbench compute similarly in the shadow of the tomb raider, the vega 64 walks all over the m1 gpu also in blender both in the bmw render and in the most long and therefore classroom testing is more demanding, this also compounds the fact that the m1 has to go through rosetta while the intel imac pro doesn't have to do any of that;

However, in Final Cut Pro things get much closer when rendering a 10 minute, 10 bit clip. less time on the imac pro, but the gap isn't that wide, but when we consider these numbers and the fact that the imac pro completely annihilates the m1 in every benchmark, it becomes even more surprising how good the experience is. was editing on this imac and yes it definitely takes a lot longer to render and export compared to the imac pro but when I actually work with the footage it is phenomenal given the price of this imac, that being said I had several complaints.

With the 24-inch imac getting on my nerves number one, you may have noticed the Logitech speakers on my desk. I use them for editing and general audio listening, but since the imac has a headphone jack on the side, the cable looks absolutely terrible when plugged in. Also, the imac pro has a uh s2 SD card slot which I absolutely adore for the first video. I had to use a random USB SD card adapter and it was painfully slow. It took me over 40 minutes to import images that would normally take me around 4 minutes not to mention the fact that it also used up my remaining Thunderbolt port because the other one is occupied by my 48 terabyte storage drive which is where I do everything. my video editing, so I had no ports left and so on the second day of use.

This device led me to purchase this Anker Thunderbolt dock. Now it's primarily made for laptops because it has 85 watts of power delivery through its Thunderbolt connection and it also has DisplayPort and HDMI for connecting to monitors, but since it still works. with the imac it was really nice to have this to connect ethernet, various USBs, a couple more type C and critically that SD card slot which I've really been missing and it's also nice to be able to have this on the desktop and No I have to look behind the imac to plug in the SD card.

I really like this Thunderbolt Hub. It's not as expensive as some of the others. It's like 180 or something. I'll link it in the description below if you want. to check it out and I know what you're thinking, you're thinking Luke, you said this was a revision of the base model and you added almost 200 to the cost, why didn't you go for the mid level? At that point, well, if I had gone for the mid-tier, I would still have needed an SD card reader and in this case I also have Ethernet, plus looking at those two USBC ports, exactly what I would have had with the mid-tier imac, so i ended up spending less than the mid-level imac and got a lot more ports on top of it, but all that aside, the big question for this video was could I ditch the imac pro 10,000 and go with a base model. 1300 imac instead, well the fact that this imac is still in the main edit slot should tell you a lot.

In fact, I'm going to continue using this for this video, as well as many more videos I may watch until some of the annoyances are caught. Come with me and I want to change back, I admit that part of the reason I like using this is the novelty of a new machine with a new design. I really like the form factor of this imac and have really grown on it. I like it quite a bit, but eventually it's possible that the slower render times, slower export times, less RAM, and slower SD card reader could lead me back to the imac pro, but there is one thing that I definitely learned from this experiment that whatever Apple has in store for the imac will almost certainly mean that I'm selling the imac pro and that's pretty impressive because ten thousand dollars and three hundred dollars is crazy.

I'm curious to know what you think. Surprised at how good or bad the 24 inch imac was in this test, do you think you could use the 24 inch imac for your workflow? Let me know those things in the comments below and as usual, don't forget to like and subscribe. and I'll see you in the next video here we go