This post was last modified: 2020-12-01, 10:44 by Gunther.

The old Mac mini that I use for building LRT on mac is barely usable for other things. ;-) That's the worst piece of hardware I ever spent money for... ;-) The M1 is a complete difference.

What I did was launch LRT in parallel on the M1 Mini and on my Threadripper with 16/32 cores, much more memory etc. That's my working PC.
I've set LRT to use 8 parallel threads on both (normally the threadripper would do 32) - and the threadrippter used 2/3 of the time of the M1 for generating Visual Previews for a 600 images raw sequence.
I found that quite good for the M1.

Of course those different architectures have different strengths. The M1 cannot compete with a real PC workstation in many areas - but regarding the fact that it doesn't even have a dedicated graphics unit, it's quite impressive.

Bottomline: The rosetta emulation doesn't seem to be a big bottleneck. There will be native versions of Adobe DNG Converter coming and I will also try to bring a native version of the Core LRT. This might then further increase performance a bit.
But it will mostly depend on adobe, when they bring a native Lightroom Classic. This will probably be the biggest performance boost.

This post was last modified: 2021-02-02, 20:42 by jahdou.

I think ARM is the future in notebooks. Microsoft is also working on ARM notebooks. I am looking forward to a native support of LRTimelapse. Thanks Gunther

Any news / feedback how properly Lr Timelapse is running on Apple Silicon? Going to use it pretty soon.
Feedback appreciated

Hello Gunther. I would also be interested if the Native Apple Silicon version of LRTimelpase comes out.?

I'm working on it and it looks good so far. Please stay tuned! :-)

That is so cool I just got my M1 Pro machine and those things are just crushing everything else. Can't wait to use the power on timelapses Thanks Günther!

LRTimelapse is already quite powerful on the new Macs, just try it! :-)

This post was last modified: 2021-11-29, 14:07 by dadebue.

Yes it is. I've already compared to my current Desktop (Ryzen 2700x & 64GB RAM & 1080Ti) and Lightroom export times are around 100% faster. LRTimelapse rendering times are around 25% faster

I'm just curious to see the fully native speeeeeeeeeed then...

You will... :-)

I did a comparison of my old MacBook Pro with a new one with M1 Max chip when I got it. As I was just interested in rough differences between both of them, all measurements were done by hand and not intended for public release, but you may be interested

Model name: MacBook Pro
Model identification: MacBookPro15,1
Processor type: 6-Core Intel Core i7
Processor speed: 2,6 GHz
Number of processors: 1
Total cores: 6
L2-Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3-Cache: 9 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: activated
Speicher: 32 GB

versus

Model name: MacBook Pro
Model identification: MacBookPro18,4
Chip: Apple M1 Max
Total cores: 10 (8 performance und 2 efficiency)
Memory: 32 GB

250 dng files with 40MB, approx. 10GB in total on internal SSD.
Initial read out if sequence (Exif, preview luminance): 20 seconds vs. 19 seconds
Saving Metadata: 2,3 seconds vs. 2,3 seconds
Import Lightroom: 8 vs. -
Visual Previews: 2 min 8 seconds vs. 1 min 21 seconds
Deflicker (20, more, 3 passes): 2 min 59 seconds vs. 2 min 52 seconds
Read metadata from files (without speedup): 17 seconds vs. 12 seconds
Render from LR (original size, 16 bit TIFF): 19 min 20 seconds vs. 7 min 37 seconds
Render in LRT (ProRes, source size, very high, 422, BT2020, Full range, sharpen): 3 minutes 9 seconds vs. 1 minutes 38 seconds

Some hints:
- I did not use the After Effects beta, which has M1 support, as it is running unstable on my side.
- DNG Converter supports M1
- Lightroom supports M1
- ffmpeg does not yet M1 at it seems that the developers are facing issues with the video encoding framework. At the moment, ffmpeg built for M1 is slower than ffmpeg for intel in Rosetta.
- The numbers do not show that huge differences, but it feels much faster. I am not sure if the workflow was getting even faster as there were some background activities on the brand new machine.

My conclusion:
I am quite impressed by the speed bump. I was thinking about getting a workstation with Thread Ripper as rendering slave, but I was never happy having a second computer. I had a 15 inch MacBook Pro and switched to the 14 inch MacBook Pro. As the resolution of the new one is higher than of the old one, this was not an issue until now. In the office, I am working with an external display.
Using the Intel MacBook Pro with an external 4K display results in a high idle load and even activates the fans. No issue with the M1 MacBook Pro.
Rendering with battery power is working great. One day I started after lunch, edited multiple sequences in Lightroom, After Effects and exported them in LRTimelapse the whole afternoon and had still some charge in the battery at evening.