Performance Tests: Adobe Premiere Pro 25 [u]

[Updated Nov. 23, 2024, with more charts and improved comparisons.]

This review looks at the performance differences in video editing running Adobe Premiere Pro 25  on a variety of Macs from the 2018 Mac mini to the new 2024 Apple M4 Pro Mac mini. I purchased all these Macs, over time, for my own use.

RELEVANT ARTICLES

• My recommendations on how to configure each of the M4 Macs for video editing.
• How I configured the Mac mini that I bought and why I chose these specs.
• Performance tests of Apple Final Cut Pro 11 running on four different Macs.
• Performance tests of DaVinci Resolve 19.1 running on four different Macs.
• Performance comparison between Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and Resolve.

For more reviews like this, please subscribe to my free, weekly newsletter: Edit SMARTER. Published since 2004, each issue is filled with news, reviews and tutorials you can use every week.

Thanks!

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The 2024 Mac mini unlocks a world of power in a tiny package at a small price. While it is extremely fast, it does not win every race. Different tasks provide different performance.

Premiere, as you’ll see, ranges in performance, not just by computer but by task. Because the performance you get depends upon a number of different factors.

Before I get into the details, if you own an Intel system and your time is valuable, you need to upgrade. Any M-series Mac blows the doors off any Intel system, including all Intel Mac Pros. It’s not even close. However, if money is tight, buy a used M-series Mac. As you’ll see in the charts below, even used gear delivers great benefits.

In my testing, I compared the performance of Adobe Premiere Pro running on a new M4 Pro Mac mini to a 2018 Mac mini, M1 Pro MacBook Pro, and M2 Max Mac Studio. The short answer is that there is no media editing you can imagine that the M4 Pro Mac mini can’t handle – limited only by the speed and capacity of your storage. It packs very high performance into a very small package at a great price.

Manufacturer: Apple Inc.
Product: M4 Pro Mac mini
Website: https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/
Starting price: $599.00 (US)
Price as reviewed: $2,499.00 (US)

MY GEAR

These are the specs of the four computers I used for testing.

This is the third Mac mini that I’ve owned; my first was purchased back around 2010 or so. The unit it will replace is a 2018 Mac mini with an i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of internal storage. I’m currently using it as a web server and for scanning slides and still photos.

Much has been written about the M4 Mac mini. Here are my personal highlights:

• Its small size means it fits anywhere.
• It easily drives two 4K computer monitors (I tested using LG and BenQ)
• It is easily controlled using Apple Remote Desktop. However, doing so results in a 3-12% performance hit.
• Even under heavy use it barely gets warm.
• It is dead quiet – or close enough that I don’t worry about it
• It has speed to burn.

Since my focus is on media editing, principally video editing, I want to compare Premiere’s performance to these earlier computers. The results surprised me. While it didn’t win every test, it did perform exceptionally well.

GEEKBENCH RESULTS

The first place everyone goes to test speed is GeekBench. Here, the speed of a single CPU core in the M4 Pro handily wins the race.

A single CPU core of the M4 Pro is:

• 5.6X faster than the i7 on the 2018 Mac mini
• 1.4X faster than an M2 Max Mac Studio.

When it comes to the combined speed of all CPUs, the M4 Pro again wins the race. The combined speed of all CPU cores on the M4 Pro are:

• 5.2X faster than the i7 on the 2018 Mac mini
• 1.4X faster than an M2 Max Mac Studio.

However, when it comes to GPU speeds, core counts matter. Here, the Mac Studio wins because the M2 Max has 30 GPU cores compared to 16 in the M4 Pro. Still, the M4 Pro is 17.5X faster than the i7.

As you’ll discover, while GeekBench provides good numbers for comparing hardware systems, it isn’t a good indicator into the real-world performance of video editing where the video editing software plays a more dominant role in performance.

INTERNAL DRIVE PERFORMANCE

Next, I compared the speeds of the internal drive. While there was a big jump in speed – principally due to improvements in SSD bandwidth – there is not a huge difference between M-series computers.

NOTE: Internal M-series Apple drives roughly equal the speed of  Thunderbolt 5-attached external storage which delivers up to 6,000 MB/second.

Also, and I need to stress this, you should ALWAYS plan to use external storage for media. Apple storage is expensive, and regardless of how much you buy, you will never have enough. Use the internal storage for the operating system, applications, and work files.

All of these computers had either 1 or 2 TB of internal storage. All tests projects and media stored on a high-speed SSD RAID connected via Thunderbolt 3/4. No test came close to fully saturating that bandwidth. Premiere does not process media quickly.

ETHERNET PERFORMANCE

A 1G Ethernet network delivers about 100 MB/second in data transfer speeds. Fast, but rarely enough for reliable editing. My network is configured for 10G. While I don’t edit from a server, I decided to see if there was any significant difference in speed between the Mac Studio and the Mac mini.

There wasn’t. The speed differences indicated here were due more to bandwidth issues internal to my Synology server.

NOTE: While I really like the high-speed data transfer of 10G to my server and use it regularly for backups, I don’t use it for editing because the Synology keeps dropping frames. Theoretically, it shouldn’t. Actually, it does.

PREMIERE PRO PERFORMANCE

When I tested Premiere, I looked at the following scenarios:

• Render and export times for a simple edit of cuts, dissolves and titles
• Render and export times for a complex effects edit
• 4K multicam editing tests
• Apple Compressor speed tests

Also, software always lags hardware for performance. Apple has to ship the gear before programmers can tweak their software to take advantage of it. This is especially true for the new M4 Macs. As measured by Activity Monitor:

• Premiere never used all the available CPU resources (top red arrow). On this system the maximum CPU load is 1,200%.
• Premiere never exported faster than 1 GB/second, even when connected to a high-speed SSD RAID. Most of the time, it was much less (lower red arrow).
• However, Premiere regularly used all the GPU cores for most renders. (The solid blue box shows all GPUs are fully occupied.)

Unlike FCP, Premiere uses the performance cores of all M-series systems. However, it didn’t come close to maxing them out.

For my first test, I created a simple, 10-minute sequence containing 60 UHD ProRes 422 clips, using just cuts, dissolves and simple titles. No color grading and no effects.

The M4 Pro Mac mini did very well, but the GPU power of the additional cores in the Mac Studio delivered the fastest performance. It was also striking that rendering, by itself, was significantly faster than rendering and exporting.

These speed differences are even more dramatically illustrated when I set the speed of the 2018 Mac mini to 1:

• The M4 Pro was 32.4X faster than the 2018 Mac mini
• The Mac Studio was 36.9X faster than the 2018 Mac mini

This 10 minute project had a lot more complex effects:

• 48 separate clips, all ProRes 422 UHD/29.97
• Two nests with 19 clips each
• Dissolves scattered periodically
• Scaling one nest to 30%, the other to 45%
• Color grading one nest using an adjustment layer
• Running the other nest in reverse
• Blurring a nest using an adjustment layer
• Vignettes on a nest using an adjustment layer

What really surprised me – especially after the blistering speeds in Final Cut and Resolve – was how similar these times were on all four computers. I have no idea why.

The biggest speed differential was less than 3X, as opposed to the 30 – 60X speeds in other software. However, it would appear that not all of these effects – though common – are optimized for Apple silicon computers.

NOTE: This test cannot be directly compared to the complex edit in Final Cut because the effects were not, exactly, the same. However, you can draw general conclusions because the two projects were very similar.

Taking the complex edit that was exported from Final Cut – because I wanted both Compressor and Media Encoder to compress the exact same file – I compressed it into both H.264 and HEVC using the default 1080p settings in Adobe Media Encoder, with one change: I added a watermark with an 80% opacity.

The 2018 Mac mini was STUNNINGLY slow – talking almost an hour to compress this ten minute video. The M4 Mac mini compressed it in slightly more than two minutes – more than 22X faster!

All the M-series computers are far, far faster.

Converting these results into how much faster an M-series computer is to the 2018 Mac mini, we are seeing a breathtaking improvement in performance.

MULTICAM EDITING

Frankly, multicam editing in Premiere is a mess. It is a memory hog, generates dropped frames just by looking cross-ways at the monitor, and delivers inconsistent results. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Premiere has a dropped frame indicator (available from the Program Monitor wrench menu) that glows green when no dropped frames are detected and yellow when they are. Dropped frames are problem because they indicate clips that are losing sync.

The 2018 Mac mini could not play even a two-angle multicam stream. I could PLAY a 35 angle stream on the M2 Mac Studio, but as soon as I made a single edit, frames started dropping.

As this table illustrates, I could get ten to fifteen streams to reliably edit with no dropped frames. Final Cut, in comparison EASILY handles 40+ 4K streams of ProRes 422. So, I wondered, where’s the limitation?

NOTE: A “stream” is a single video file. So, a four-camera shoot would generate four streams, one from each camera. A multicam edit plays all these streams at the same time.

Here’s part of the problem. Premiere is using more than 40 GB of RAM on an M2 Max Mac Studio just to stream 30 angles! This is a ridiculous amount of memory! By comparison, Final Cut uses 2.2 GB to stream more than 40 angles. Resolve uses less than 8 GB.

NOTE: Just to be clear, you still can’t EDIT 30 streams on Premiere without dropping frames, but you can PLAY them – even though they suck up a LOT of RAM.

Personally, unless I’m only editing a very few multicam angles, I would never choose Premiere for multicam editing unless I was forced. There are better options.

SUMMARY

The M4 Pro Mac mini is an amazing machine, with performance to burn at very attractive prices. Even the base level M4 is more than adequate for most single camera editing, though I would strongly advise getting at least 1 TB of storage.

For most editors, the M4 Pro Mac mini will meet your needs now and long into the future. However, there are a few adjustments I recommend when purchasing your system:

• Opt for more GPU cores
• If you plan doing significant multicam editing, increase the RAM to at least 48 GB
• Premiere won’t use all the CPU cores available, but, unlike FCP, it does use the performance cores.
• In all cases, upgrading to 1-2 TB of internal storage will be enough. Supplement your storage with fast Thunderbolt 3/4 or 5 devices.

For video editing, the M4 Pro is a delight. However, there are still a few reasons to consider a used M2 Mac Studio, none of which relate to performance:

• More ports. The Mac mini has seven, the Mac Studio has twelve and, on my Mac Studio, I’m using all of them. If you need lots of ports, you should consider adding a dock.
• More GPU cores. More GPU cores means faster rendering. Not higher quality, just faster.
• More RAM. You can get more RAM with the Studio than the mini, however, after 48 GB you’ll see diminishing returns on your RAM investment.

All that being said, the M4 Pro Mac mini comes close to the performance of a Mac Studio at a fraction of the price. And it fits very nicely… just about anywhere.

---

Bookmark the permalink.