Be sure to follow me on Twitter at on Facebook at /DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at /DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at /DavidGewirtzTV. You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. The Mercury Helios FX was standout in how quickly it faded into the background and just did its job.Īll told, if you're doing extreme pro work, the 2018 i7 Mac Mini, the Vega 56, and the Helios FX can help you get your job done - and all together, at about two-thirds of the entry price of a base iMac Pro. The real bottom line is I am thrilled with Thunderbolt 3, the 2018 Mac Mini, and the ability to add a full-sized high-end PC GPU to my setup. That's just Apple being Apple.Īlso: New 2018 Mac Mini: Pro machine in a tiny, upgradeable package I'm a bit weirded about why Compressor insists on using the on-board video, but that's neither the fault of the Vega 56 nor the Mercury Helios FX. The exact model I bought was the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX Vega 56 8GB HBM2 Dual HDMI/DP PCI-E Graphics Card. To that, I added the Sapphire Vega 56 card recommended directly by Apple. I've reviewed a number of OWC products in the past with excellent results, so I reached out to it for its Mercury Helios FX eGPU enclosure.

Toss some effects on top of that stream, add a third or fourth 4K video layer, and the chipboard 630 chip didn't have the chops.įor that kind of load, an eGPU was necessary. But add a second camera and everything slowed to a crawl.

But I will tell you this: The off-the-shelf Mac Mini i7 with 32GB of RAM edited a single 4K video stream in Final Cut surprisingly well.

I'm not going to give you benchmarks, because they can be found all over the web. When I built out my 2018 Mac Mini with the intent of making it my main workhorse machine, I knew its onboard Intel 630 graphics were probably not good enough for the kind of graphics load multicam 4K video editing requires.

Mac mini for 4k video