October 6, 2025

Webinars will resume later in October.

As always, I welcome thoughts on what subjects these should over. Drop me an email with your thoughts.

Let go deeper into performance. Any M-series Mac is fast enough to edit up to 8K video. The bottleneck is no longer our computer, but our storage.

We are rapidly outgrowing the performance limitations of HDDs (Hard Disk Drives.) We need to put SSDs at the heart of our active editing storage.

Back to our head-to-head comparisons between FCP, Premiere and Resolve.

Here, I look at editing.

Computers may not be able to speed our thinking, choose a shot quicker, or decide how much to trim, but they can help us share the finished project with the world faster.

In this final article, I compare render and export speeds between Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve.

A quote variously attributed to Babe Paley; Wallace, the Duchess of Windsor; and Gloria Vanderbilt; goes: "You can't be too rich or too thin." In a similar vein, it is impossible for a computer system to be "too fast."

Still, these days, any M-series Mac is more than fast enough to edit any format of video up to 12K. The gating factor is not the computer, but our storage. As I've learned, I spend far more on storage hardware than I spend on computers. 

But, amidst all this focus on speed, don't lose sight of the fact that all this precious data needs to be backed up. Backups are not sexy. No one writes breathless tutorials extolling their virtues, but woe-betide you if you lose a file without a back-up. 

Media storage, management, backups and all that related hardware is what allows us to sleep at night. Back up hardware doesn't need to be blindingly fast. Backup software doesn't need to have the latest AI features. But both must be rock-solid, completely trustworthy and run automatically in the background.

As you continue building your system, allow time to create reliable, regular backups. Then check them every so often to make sure things are running right. If you're lucky, you'll never need them. But when you do... you really, really need them to be there.

Until next Monday, stay healthy, stay hopeful and edit well.

TUTORIALS & REVIEWS

» Performance Comparison: Final Cut, Premiere & Resolve (Tests)

   » This summarizes my performance testing across all three NLEs.

» How and Why to Use SSDs to Improve Computer Performance (Tests)

   » SSDs, especially the right SSDs, unlock massive speed boosts.

» Editing Comparison: Final Cut, Premiere & Resolve (Tutorial)

   » Here's how they stack up based on my experience.

» Render/Export Comparison: Final Cut, Premiere & Resolve (Tests)

   » Once the edit is complete, here's how quick they can deliver it.