My mac studio is not rendering my videos properly - can AppleCare address this?

Question

My mac studio is not rendering my videos properly - can AppleCare address this?

I've had this Mac Studio for nearly a month now, M1 Ultra, 128 GB's of ram, neural engine juiced enough to power a small country.

As a video editor - and having upgraded from the M1 Mac Mini 16 GB's ram and 1/16th the processing and GPU stats. I'm having some issues when rendering out projects. It's been nearly every output since switching. Don't get me wrong, there have been some very noticeable performance gains (render times that used to be 10+ minutes, now take 2 mins -- tracking masks that used to be a 3-5 minute slog are now happening in 2-3 seconds and I move to the next) -- but the rendering issue. This is tricky. It's causing a reflection of my work with clients. It's usually in the form of stuttering during simple cross-dissolve transitions in between clips or outright glitches - (see attached).

I've been through every youtube video I can find on fixes - and tried moving through various render settings. But, that's just it, if the render settings worked out just fine on prior edits with the M1 Mac mini, why would I now need to try 3-4 different encoding/rending/tweaked options with something that is so much more powerful in every way?

So - my question is, is there something that I should be doing with AppleCare? Can this be fixed? Did I get a lemon? Is anyone else seeing this?

Mac Studio, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jul 17, 2023 5:02 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

expansive-john Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 19, 2023 3:41 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Right, no this system is free of all that. I do some backup via Time Machine to external HDD's manually at the end of a long editing session and an iDrive backup from those external drives (in a closet) to the cloud in the middle of the night. I even keep my Mac HD empty of project files...having an external NVME 2TB SSD drive via Thunderbolt 4 and a jump through an OWC thunderbolt hub that holds projects currently in process.

AppleCare ran a full diagnostic which showed all hardware to be running smoothly.

I backed up my project database of all projects in Davinci Resolve, saved and exported all presets, templates. Uninstalled. Then deleted the remaining few folders of data. Then re-installed. And still had issues. 20+ tests later, and adjusting every rendering setting I could think of, I noticed that most A-roll footage was at 29.97fps and the project was at 24fps. With the project settings being too late to adjust to 29.97 (and trying to output at that causing new issues), I streamlined project, playback/monitoring and export to 24fps and that seemed to handle just about all glitching as well as the stuttering issues.

It would appear that a frame rate smushing, once the project got to a certain size, was the culprit.

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Answer 2

Jul 18, 2023 4:45 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Hey Grant - that was the video paused, and then I took a screenshot of the glitch. That's a moment in the video where a photo is onscreen (and old photo from the 60's or 70's) - that emphasizes what the interviewee was saying.

Stuttering is also an issue. -- Not as bad as a glitch, but, where it didn't seem to properly render out a transition or moment between clips usually, and it lags, trying to get to the next frame.

Video created in Resolve. AppleCare asked me to try rendering it out in safe mode and see if it still happened then - with the idea that we should try to pin down if it is caused by the software or the hardware. Also mentioned that, it might be a bad graphics card. I had noticed that after running a few more tests, I was now having issues getting proper playback...just scrubbing the playhead fwd in the exported video, in quicktime, was not working correctly...it would get stuck, then start playing audio with the wrong video...

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Answer 3

Jul 18, 2023 5:33 PM in response to expansive-john

By far the easiest way to cause poor performance, instability, and crashing is to install ANY third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, or Virus scanners. or a VPN that you installed yourself.

You should remove any and all (other than Apple built-in) virus scanners, speeder uppers, optimizers, cleaners, App deleters or VPN packages you installed yourself, or anything of that ilk.

Third-party file Sync-ers such as DropBox, BackBlaze, OneDrive, or GoogleDrive can ruin performance, but are not inherently dangerous.

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Answer 4

BDAqua

Level 10

251,263 points

Jul 19, 2023 1:33 AM in response to expansive-john

What Port & cable are you using?

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Answer 5

Jul 19, 2023 5:07 PM in response to expansive-john

<< It would appear that a frame rate smushing, once the project got to a certain size, was the culprit. >>

Thank You so much for sharing that nice terse summary of what seemed to be the issue for you!

Your post will be here for a long time, and readers may find it by searching for similar issues. Now they have one more obscure thing to check for.

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Answer 6

Jul 17, 2023 6:21 PM in response to expansive-john

the picture you posted...

screenshot or photo of the screen?

if that is a photo, does the screen shot have those same defects?

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My mac studio is not rendering my videos properly - can AppleCare address this?

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