Is 8GB RAM enough for Final Cut Pro on an M2 Mac Mini?

I have the basic M2 mini with 8 GB RAM and it sails through 4K let alone 1080p.

What is more, I am actually running it off a bootable cheap (£60) 1 TB SSD and there is no loss of performance.

It is more than twice as fast as my 27" 2017 iMac which also has only 8 GB RAM and has been processing multiple streams of 4K with colour grading and other effects added smoothly for the past 5 years.

I realise that my opinion is at variance with others and I would suggest you get something better if you are doing many hours of editing on a daily basis for highly professional organisations paying whacking salaries . . . something like a maxed out Mac Studio for £9,000 . . . otherwise the £580 M2 mini will be fine.

Is 8GB enough? Or should I upgrade to 16GB?

If you want to edit videos smoothly, I think 16GB is the minimum standard. There must be plenty of free space not only in RAM but also in the built-in SSD (15% or more). Buy the highest performance Mac within your budget.

If I had a penny for every FCP student and client who had issues that disappeared when they went from 8GB to 16GB or even better 32GB, I'd own Elon Musk.

A word about running the mini from an external USB 3.0 SSD.

When the M1 came out there were a number of scare stories that said the 256 GB SSD of the M1 would wear out fairly quickly as with only 8 GB RAM there would be a lot of memory swapping.

These claims turned out to be exaggerated but to be on the safe side I decided to run the M2 from the aforementioned plug-in SSD.

The process is simple. You download the Sonoma OS installer from the AppStore and select the external SSD to have it installed on. That will take up to an hour.

You then select the external as the mini's startup disk in System Settings and click Restart . . . that's it! From then on the mini is working from the external. That takes seconds.

As a result, in the last 9 months my internal SSD has only written 500 GB of data and that was done before I started using the external.

Initially I was concerned there might be a performance hit as the Crucial SSD is only a fraction the speed of the mini's but in practice there is no difference.

EDIT: The external needs to be formatted as APFS . . . they usually come as FAT32 or something similar.

This process takes a minute or so in Disk Utility.

What if I have a 16gb RAM with 190GB of space on my hard drive, but run into clipping issues when trying to playback for edit? Volume cuts in and out, playback gets choppy. Doubles my editing time. And that's with using proxy on 4k files

If you are using 8 tracks of 4K in a one hour video that is possible.

If you are not there is something wrong with either your machine or your technique.

What are the precise specs of your project including its length, number of tracks and effects applied?

Without details like that we have no idea whether you are editing a Hollywood blockbuster or a family movie . . . which makes a world of difference.

It's like saying your car's performance is poor whilst omitting to mention the 2 ton caravan it is pulling! 🤔

Just done a quick test.

22 minute project with 7 tracks of native 4K Picture In Picture and colour corrected.

Playback is smooth. Adding an eighth track resulted in dropped frames but perfectly watchable.

All this done with the M2 booted from the external. I did have 5 other apps open at the time.

I'm not claiming this performance is brilliant but if all you need is a ten minute 1080p video . . . nuff said!

A short while ago I had a shock and thought I might have to eat my words about the good performance of the basic mini!

I had decided to test 4K on DaVinci Resolve so I used 7 stacked PIP and colour corrected clips lasting 2 minutes similar to the ones used in the FCP test.

The M2 wouldn't even start playing back so I converted them all to 50% proxies, still with no luck.

I then began deleting a track at a time until finally the playback commenced extremely erratically.

How could DVR's playback be so appalling compared to FCP? Maybe it wasn't optimised as much as FCP?

The solution came a few minutes later . . . I noticed that there were 7 other apps open and one of them was Handbrake which at that moment was busily converting a complex 4K movie.

Once I stopped it, DVR was able to playback the 7 tracks of native 4K just as smoothly as FCP.

It also exported the unrendered 2 minute 4K movie in precisely . . . 2 minutes.

I’d go with 16. 8 is minimum and if you need to run multiple apps you’ll soon get bogged down.