Developer & Media Production: Should I switch?

[jumpcutking]

I'm both a hard-core developer (always working on something game changing ) and a full-time new media producer. Meaning: I use After Effects, Adobe Primer, VSCodium, NPM & Node... as like my day to day bread and butter.

The M1 seems very impressive... and I'm wondering if I should turn in my personal i7 16g, Radeon Pro 555 2 GB, Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB... laptop for a snazzy m1. I know it will be a smaller screen.

Of course my work station is some suited up Mac Pro... (pre-cheese grading) and I do at least half of my work on that. The rest is on my personal laptop... and the occasional render machine.

So... any media professionals making the switch? Does after effects perform better with lots of vector shapes? Is the 4 camera angle Multicam 4k playback in realtime a mythical unicorn... or will my machine receive epic mode status instantly when it becomes an M1?

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

 

[lclev]

I also work as a media producer. I use Adobe AF and Premiere Pro and others. I have a 2010 Mac Pro and I also use a custom built PC Desktop to handle my 4K projects multi-camera projects. I have a 2020 13" MBP for small projects occasionally but not often.
I have thought about an Apple M1 MBP. I have decided to wait and see what the next refresh brings. I am hoping for more ports among other things. I also don't what to buy a first generation machine. And I want Adobe to work out all the kinks in their apps and the M1.

So I too would love to hear from someone using an M1 for heavy media creation.

 

[ADGrant]

You say you are a hard core developer, you don't say what it is you are developing. Most importantly, what are your target deployment platforms (iOS, MacOS, Android, Docker, Serverless etc). If you develop for MacOS you probably need an M1 Mac, iOS it would be nice, anything else I would stick to an Intel Mac for now.

 

[theSeb]

You say you are a hard core developer, you don't say what it is you are developing. Most importantly, what are your target deployment platforms (iOS, MacOS, Android, Docker, Serverless etc). If you develop for MacOS you probably need an M1 Mac, iOS it would be nice, anything else I would stick to an Intel Mac for now.

Well he mentioned node, so we can make assumptions about what he is developing: probably web frameworks and websites.

Here is a node performance comparison test.

M1 MBA vs 16" MBP (i9-9980HK)

Obviously you won't be hosting your application from your Mac, but this shows that even the MBA is perfectly fine at development and debugging.

 

[ADGrant]

Well he mentioned node, so we can make assumptions about what he is developing: probably web frameworks and websites.

Here is a node performance comparison test.

M1 MBA vs 16" MBP (i9-9980HK)

Obviously you won't be hosting your application from your Mac, but this shows that even the MBA is perfectly fine at development and debugging.

He doesn't say what he is using node for. It can be used to build server side APIs. If he is deploying those through Docker for example, Apple Silicon may not be the best choice right now.

 

[theSeb]

He doesn't say what he is using node for.

This is true.

It can be used to build server side APIs. If he is deploying those through Docker for example, Apple Silicon may not be the best choice right now.

You can build and deploy docker images onto other platforms using Docker on an M1 Mac.

 

[ADGrant]

You can build and deploy docker images onto other platforms using Docker on an M1 Mac.

You can if you don't mind depending on pre-production software. Docker for the M1 Mac is at RC1 right now.

 

[theSeb]

You can if you don't mind depending on pre-production software. Docker for the M1 Mac is at RC1 right now.

This is true as well. I do expect though that hardcore developers have separate machines to do builds on. OP mentioned a cheese grater old Mac Pro so he could use that for the production deployment builds. For actual development and testing the M1 is a fantastic machine, unless you like connecting many monitors.