But is the editing process smooth and lag-free after that?
Because the time spent waiting to load the photos can be used to do other things.
The real question is can you edit and put out more photos? And whether the work has deadline. The bottleneck is probably time limited to taking photos.
I resisted upgrading my Mac Pro 2013 for the longest time even though newer Macs are several times more powerful. Because even if a new Mac is 100 times faster, I can’t make more YT videos as the bottleneck is my limited time to shoot videos with my camera.
E.g. My videos take 2 hours to export on the Mac Pro 2013. I upgraded to M1 Mac Mini recently only because the video editing process has lag. The overall experience is smoother, more satisfying, yes. Now videos take 5-10 mins to export, but I wasn't able to make more videos because the bottle neck is not the computer.
Ok, what if you discover an error after you have spent 2 hours exporting a video for YouTube?
You correct it in 10 minutes and then your machine is locked for another 2 hours. If you were part of a production house that would be totally unacceptable.
It worked for you because you don't seem to have a deadline or clients expecting a finished product within a set timeframe and the next job waiting to be completed.
Generally Adobe has poorly multithreaded optimisations for most of their filters, like capping out at 6 cores for specific workloads but then single threaded performance becomes equally important.
If I do product shoots the "hero shots" will usually be made of anywhere from 20 to 50 RAW images that need to be focus stacked and that takes a lot of computational power (and RAM).
A long time ago I worked for a phographer who had seven Macs in his computer room, each set up with a keyboard and mouse and had a chair in front of it.
This was back in the power Mac tower days.
I was there to scan his thousands of slides, optimize them and categorize them and build his website.
Not a day would go by where I didn’t have at least four of the computers running full time doing tasks. One would be scanning, one burning CDs, one was my workstation and another was running Apple scripts generating thousands of webpages.
That experience taught me that having SEVERAL lower powered machines is Way Way Way more efficient than having just one or two top tier workstations.
If I were to buy a Mac Studio today, without hesitation, I’d buy four Mi Max versions instead of two Ultras.
And I’d NEVER buy an Ultra. Two Maxes will kick one Ultra’s butt every time from an efficiency point of view.
One can be churning on one thing while you’re doing something else.
From a production point of view the cost difference from $8k to $16k isn't much. If it enabled you to finish tasks faster they would go that route. He also needed to pay you for your time, which would cost a lot more yearly. If he could cut your salary by 40% by going with slightly more expensive machines he totally would.
If he needed that many machines he probably also had enough work to gain from faster processing and finishing the tasks quicker.
Everything else in the production were more expensive, from camera bodies, lenses, lightning, studio, tripods, dollies etc.
