DaVinci Resolve, the well-known video editing and color correction tool that competes with Apple’s Final Cut Pro X and Adobe’s Premiere, serves the Mac manufacturer once again as proof of the high performance of its in-house ARM chips. Even before that, the Apple Silicon Macs overtook their Intel competitors with the program, for example in 4K video exports, as the detailed Mac & i test in February showed.
Screwed on to the engine
Now developer Blackmagic Design has improved the processing engine contained in DaVinci Resolve and adapted it for the ARM Macs. The result, like the company announced by press release: DaVinci Resolve in version 17.3 is said to work up to three times faster than on Intel machines for certain tasks. This applies, for example, to the playback of high-resolution renderings, the editing and color grading of 8K and 4K projects, it said.
In addition, you can now use H.265 hardware encoding on M1 Macs, which increases rendering by 65 percent – but only if you are satisfied with a slightly lower quality. AVC intra files are now decoded directly in the M1 SoC with the aid of the included media engine. This also helps when playing such files.
Battery loss is also less
Blackmagic Design also worked on DaVinci Resolve’s hunger for energy. According to the developer, the engine optimizations can now lead to a 30 percent increase in battery life on M1 notebooks (MacBook Air M1, MacBook Pro M1) – under optimal conditions, of course.
DaVinci Resolve 17.3 is a “really amazing update,” according to Blackmagic design chief Grant Petty. The speed improvements are “breathtaking and hard to believe”. He himself has not seen such improvements since the Mac’s transition from the 68000 processors to the PowerPC chips in the early 1990s. “Who would have thought a year ago that you could play back and edit multiple 4K streams natively on a MacBook Air?” This is now “easy” with DaVinci Resolve on M1 machines.
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