loading . . . Some Notes on Editing 4K Video on the MacBook Neo I edited my video review of the MacBook Neo using Final Cut Pro on the Neo itself. It felt like the correct thing to do. My usual video editing machine is my 16″ MacBook Pro running the M1 Pro chip with 16 gigs of RAM. Here are some notes on editing on the MacBook Neo:
1. I edited on the MacBook Neo itself, no external monitors plugged in, and the 13″ screen was easily workable. I have a 27″ 4K monitor that I plug my MacBook Pro into, but if you want to edit on a smaller screen, it is easily doable.
2. The first thing I noticed was that when I opened up FCP and set up a new project, the default option was for a 1080p video. It always, by default, offered the 4K option on my MacBook Pro. I do not know if FCP has some code to determine the default option based on the machine. If anything, the MacBook Neo has faster single-core performance than my M1 MacBook Pro.
3. The thing to note is that I did not install any new plugins for FCP on the Neo, so all the edits I did were based on what’s there by default.
4. The mechanical trackpad (versus the Force Touch trackpad on the MacBook Pro) was a non-issue. I did use my MX Master 4 mouse whilst editing, but I used the trackpad too, and it was usable. The lack of Force Touch was a non-issue, but I did wish it was bigger. That said, the Neo itself is a smaller device, so there is no space for a trackpad as large as the one on the 16″ MacBook Pro.
5. My editing workflow usually involves filming on the spot and then AirDropping to the machine I am editing on. I noticed that AirDropping to the Neo from my iPhone 17 Pro Max was a tad slower compared to dropping to my MacBook Pro. It wasn’t so slow that it made me inefficient, but I noticed I was waiting a bit longer than I was used to. I thought the Neo had a older version of Wi-Fi, but it actually has Wi-Fi 6E while my MacBook Pro has Wi-Fi 6. The same goes for Bluetooth: the MacBook Neo has Bluetooth 6, whereas the MacBook Pro has Bluetooth 5. So the Neo has a better Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, yet it did feel slower. I am not sure why. I want to reiterate that this is based on feel; I did not time anything. It felt a tad slower, maybe a second or two. It is completely workable.
6. One thing that always happens when I AirDrop items from my phone is that, because my phone is always on portrait lock, the videos I drop will be in portrait orientation. I end up having to use the ‘Turn Left’ option in macOS Finder so they are in the correct orientation before I drag the file onto the timeline in FCP. This was noticeably faster on the Neo than on my MacBook Pro, probably owing to the faster single-core performance of the A18 Pro chip compared to the M1 Pro.
7. Whilst editing, it was overall very good, although scrubbing the timeline was at times a bit jittery. I had a lot of other things running at the same time, including the Claude app in the background and Safari with at least 10 tabs open. But it was not bad enough that I had to quit other apps. It jittered here and there, but I carried on, and so did the MacBook Neo.
8. One thing I also noticed was that switching from the Blade tool to the Select tool was not as snappy as on my MacBook Pro. I use the keyboard shortcuts ‘B’ (for the Blade tool) and ‘A’ (for the Select tool) and switch between them quite often. Hitting ‘A’ on the Neo meant I had to wait a split second before the tool actually changed.
9. It beach-balled once, for around 10 to 15 seconds.
10. I have an external SSD (a WD Black SN850X 4TB in a Satechi M.2 enclosure) connected via a Thunderbolt 4 cable. I wanted to copy my .fcpbundle file onto it to keep it alongside my other backups, but it simply would not copy. I would plug the SSD in using the USB 3.0 port on the Neo, enter my password (it was encrypted), and it would show the files in Finder. I would then attempt to copy the .fcpbundle across and nothing would happen. The copy dialogue would appear but the transfer would not start. I tried this multiple times and eventually gave up. I ended up copying it to the iCloud Documents folder instead, which was painfully slow. The .fcpbundle for this project came to around 46GB.
11. Exporting in Apple ProRes 422 at 4K 30fps on the Neo took 2 minutes and 55 seconds. On the MacBook Pro it took 2 minutes and 7 seconds. Not bad for a $599 Macbook.
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