Editing 4K Video With MacBook Air: Mission (Absolutely) Possible

Videographer Kraig Adams posted a cool YouTube video demonstrates the abilities of a basic MacBook Air to edit 4K video. The results were quite surprising. Read below. 

MacBook Air= simple tasks and applications

The Apple MacBook Air is known for its basic minimum capabilities dedicated for simple tasks like surfing the web, emailing and working with modest GPU usage applications like keynote, pages and so on.

Editing with MacBook Air, as far as I know, was possible using iMovie or uncomplicated timeline on FCPX, not to mention 1080P for maximum resolution, unless you want your frames dropped constantly.

I was wrong!

Videographer Kraig Adams shows in his video, that it is absolutely doable to edit on FCPX with the MacBook Air, and with 4K footage, without even one frame dropped.

Kraig used the basic model that features: 

• 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 Dual-Core
• 8GB of Onboard RAM | 128GB SSD
• 13.3″ 2560 x 1600 Retina IPS Display
• Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 617
• Thunderbolt 3 | 3.5mm Headphone Jack
• Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) | Bluetooth 4.2
• 120 GB SSD

This is a very basic model that is not supposed to be targeted to the professional cine-market.

MacBook Pro exported 200% faster

Kraig reported on slight delay in render speed, thumbnails generation and export.

Besides all that, the editing workflow, playback, cut, trim and merge were just fine, like working with a MacBook Pro.

The main difference was regarding export speed. The MacBook Pro exported 200% faster.

Watch the experiment on the video below:

However, there is no info in regard to the codec used in the edit. I suppose that the MacBook Air is not tough enough to deal with huge ProRes files and RAWs (R3D, Cinema Lite, ARRIRAW and so on). Furthermore, it depends on timeline complexity, sounds, filters, effects, LUTs and layers that been added to the timeline.

[bctt tweet=”The main difference was regarding export speed. The MacBook Pro exported 200% faster.” username=””]

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Final thoughts

In my personal opinion, the MacBook Air is good enough, or should I say excellent for simple FCPX 4K missions like vlogging.

For commercial uses I would stick to my upgraded MacBook Pro.

Should you edit with a MacBook Air? Comment below.