Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1433345
48 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Winter 2022 4K r3d les. All les were exported in UHD ProRes 422 HQ and h.264 at 40mbps, as these are the most commonly accepted industry delivery formats for broadcast and web content. All content was captured at 23.976 and was processed both in Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. The accompanying chart can be used for a full overview of the results but the upshot is that Apple has put a real contender on the market, which dominates the Alienware's scores across the board, with an overwhelming advantage when it comes to ProRes content. Premiere Pro, long known for issues in terms of stability, crashed far less frequently on the Apple computer compared to the Windows one. DaVinci Resolve, though reasonably stable on both operating systems, seems to process content more efciently in macOS. The Alienware struggled with 8K content across the board, quickly agging VRAM errors if a sequence grew longer than a couple of minutes. The same error appeared when adding an included LUT and seven adjustment nodes to ProRes and h.264 footage. It only took four adjustment notes to generate these errors when working with DNxHQ or h.264 footage. Meanwhile, the M1 Max laptop kept chugging along, only throwing up a VRAM error when I hunted down a piece of 29.97 12K BRAW footage and added seventeen adjustment notes just for the purposes of trying to break the system. Interestingly, however, the Alienware did have a slight edge when it came to processing 4K r3d les captured on a camera from Red. This would seem to corroborate other online reports that Apple's new agship notebook But bold claims from a trillion-dollar company can't compare to hands-on experience, so I got my hands on a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max processor and 64gb of RAM and put it head-to-head against my 2021 Alienware m15 R4 gaming laptop, which runs on an i7-10870H CPU, RTX 3080 GPU, 32gb of RAM, and Windows 10 Pro. The results were interesting to say the least. For my tests, I downloaded or acquired samples of a variety of different le formats, including 8K ProRes 422 HQ, 4K DNxHQ, 6K BRAW, 4K h.264, 4K h.265, and