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Further to this, I watched a few past videos from Blaine yesterday and this video (while quite chaotic) gives a bunch of pretty interesting examples of how using a Film Emulation of some kind combined with some of the basic Resolve tools can give quick but very effective results: Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the way he treats Resolve.. he shows that if you know a few techniques then you can get in, make some good adjustments, get a great result, and get out, and move on with your day. It's sort of a rare counter-example of the impression that Resolve is finicky and takes hours and hours, which almost all other colour grading videos give, but isn't true. At it's most basic, you can just apply a LUT to every clip and then make basic adjustments in a node prior to the LUT on each clip and can get great results in a really quick way. This is the way that film-makers grade when they want a result, rather than the way that colour grading YouTubers grade when they're making a YT video about some nuance or other. The section from 5:00 on with the test shots shows that even if the shots weren't filmed well at all, you can get great results quickly with just a few quick techniques.

There are a lot of asterisks and "it depends" in any answer to that, but overall, I'd say that if you're spending $4k on a MBP (which updating from the base RAM and SSD would do), if you plan to edit 12k, it might be worth the extra $300 to jump to the bigger chip. It partly depends on how many effects/how much noise reduction, etc. I'd also say that if you're like most people, if you're gonna spend $4k on a laptop, you're going to want it to last for a while. You might factor that in too. Speaking for myself, I bought the lower of the M2 Max chips in my MBP and it's just barely enough to handle 8k Canon raw in Resolve and once I add noise reduction to the clips that need it, export times get pretty slow (like 40 minutes for a 15 minute short). Would having the system be 30% faster help a lot? Not really. 30 minutes to export the clips wouldn't be life changing. You might also consider whether M4 is coming soon - M2 was released in June 2022 and M3 in October 2023. If the M4 is coming, it'll probably have about a 10-15% speed boost over M3 - that or you might be able to get a nice deal on an M3 at that time. Depends on when you're planning to start shooting 12k, I suppose. 😁

I love the way Blaine constructs his videos. Zero fluff. Just tips and tricks the whole time.

Cullen Kelly says that the grain and the halation are nicer than the previous separate OFX plugins, so that's promising if you're a connoisseur / picky 🙂

From the videos I've seen on Film Look Creator, I think subtractive saturation and split toning are the things that stuck at to me as most interesting - that and I'm going to need to spend a bit of time with their grain generator to see if I like the output.

I recommend FilmConvert or Dehancer if people like the overall film look but don't want to learn to colour grade - it's a quick and effective solution. Resolve 19 has a new plugin called Film Look Creator included in the paid version that is like FilmConvert / Dehancer except it doesn't model specific film stocks but is designed to give a flexible overall film look. For most people it would be better than FilmConvert or Dehancer just for creating a nice look and not having to learn colour management etc.

Uhhh I know! Maybe this summer when I have more time! The advent of internal LUTs I think will help me on that journey. Seeing what folks have done with Dehancer has been motivating as well.

And not only RAW, Quick Sync (hardware decoding of H.264/HEVC media) supplied by Intel takes a lead AFAIK :- )

My guess is that the difference in actual user experience of a system receiving a 923 and one receiving 893 will be negligible. Between the two, I'd choose the one where I get a better deal.

Well, not exactly the fastest... https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-14900KS-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X3D/m2295306vsm2052977 https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/intel-core-i9-14900ks-content-creation-review/ Except for RAW though:

Speaking of devil... «The primary area where we found a notable difference between the 3D V-Cache processors was in thermals and power draw, where the X3D CPUs used around 30% less power and remained around 5-10 degrees Celsius cooler on our test benches.» source «(...) 7950x can actually support 192GB of RAM at the moment, with the possibility of supporting 256GB RAM soon (BIOS updates are already out)» source So, any doubts on the best processor out there? ;- )

If you're in the PC world, you're definitely better off editing on desktop vs laptop if you're working with high-res footage or doing effects, etc. Most laptops throttle down a lot when not plugged in and (in my experience) make a jet engine noise when dealing with a prolonged load on CPU/GPU. And as ac6000cw says, the mobile GPU's are almost always lesser versions of their desktop counterparts. Also when on battery, life tends to be very short because CPU/GPU pull a lot of power. My M2 Max, on the other hand, can handle 8k Canon raw acceptably - and I got the weaker variant of it. Performance is almost the same whether plugged in or on battery. Fans do ramp up when working it hard (now that I've added denoising to most of the scenes that need it, the 14-minute short I'm currently working on/grading definitely has the fans running full blast when I run an export). Basically, in absolute performance numbers a high-end PC desktop will beat any Mac currently on the market and at a fraction of the cost of a Mac Studio ($3k for a decent Ryzen + RTX 4090!). A top-of-the-line PC laptop plugged into the wall will also outperform the MBP in absolute numbers (except whoooooosh fan noise)... but if you want to actually be mobile, the Mac is the hands-down winner.

I agree (as someone who has done all my editing for years on either gaming or workstation-class laptops). Generally, decent laptops in both of those categories should have cooling good enough for long-term high CPU and GPU loads, but you do need to choose carefully - and expect them to be noisy when they are working hard! Also be careful when comparing desktop and laptop GPUs - they can have the same or very similar model numbers, but the laptop version might have different performance specs (and more aggressive thermal management) e.g. : (info from Wikipedia) The desktop version of the nVidia Quadro RTX 4000 (100-125 watts Thermal Design Power): ...versus the mobile version (60-80 watts TDP):

It's worth pointing out that the thermals might be the dominant factor here, considering that laptops will throttle down on their performance in order to manage overheating, so a few extra fans in the laptop can make more difference than which model of CPU / GPU you buy!

It costs about a grand extra... (from the current discounted price today of $2900 for DELL desktop route) https://www.pugetsystems.com/press/press-release-puget-systems-launches-new-laptops/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/workstations/laptops/c17-g/ source

For the most part, if somebody is looking at an Alienware prebuilt, they're probably not the target audience for BYOPC. At that point, it's better to go with somebody like Maingear, NZXT, or Starforge - they all use off-the-shelf parts, but you'll also pay more for the same specs as you'll get in a prebuilt from one of the big players. I'd be willing to bet that for a similar price to what you'd pay them for the above system, you'd be able to get a 14" MBP with M3 Max - and then you'd be able to edit on the go too. 😉

I would definitely not buy an Alienware prebuilt. They tend to have poor upgradability, might use weird custom parts (I think in the past there were custom sized mainboards and/or PSU used in some models) and tend to have no too great thermals. Building a PC is quite easy and there are part lists available to ensure compatibility between components.

I've heard that the 12K files are very usable in terms of performance, but it will likely depend on what mode you're shooting in. Most people aren't using the 12K at 12K - they're using it at 4K or 8K. Regardless, Resolve has an incredible array of functionality to improve performance and enable real-time editing and even colour correction on lesser hardware. This is a good overview:

Without having shot 12K, I'll say that system looks like more than enough (and if it's not, there won't be many systems that are). The RTX 4090 is the most powerful consumer GPU on the market and that's a really decent CPU. It might even be overkill (though overkill also means you probably won't be shopping for a better system in 1-2 years). If you aren't already familiar with PugetBench, Puget Systems have a nice database of results that people have achieved with various systems. https://benchmarks.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/ What's not clear on that is how expandable the system is - which was a problem with the Alienware that I had for a while. There seems to be only one more slot for NVMe beyond the boot drive and the USB ports are only 3.2 and not 4. The Alienware that I had only had a single free PCIe slot as well. In my case, it was enough to add a 10g network card and that was about it. If you want to put 12K footage locally on the machine, 2TB is going to get cramped fast. Fast USB 3.2 storage will be able to keep up, though as of a year or so ago, flash-based USB 3.x storage arrays were not so common - at least at a reasonable price. If it were me, I'd look for something with 2-3 additional NVMe slots beyond the boot drive to be able to add more local storage and I'd look for something with USB 4 since it will be compatible with most/all Thunderbolt devices which gives a lot of better/more interesting options for external storage/devices.