I need advice on which MacBook Pro I should Buy for DaVinci Resolve Editing.

Hi there everyone, upon the upcoming arrival of the exciting M5 MacBook Pro I am strongly thinking of upgrading from my M2 Mac Book Air. Inevitably the MacBook Air M2 is not designed to be great at editing my 4k high quality footage on DaVinci Resolve so I experience constant lags and stutters and glitches in the timeline and I have to export the video to actually see what the edit looks like. With the arrival of the M5 Mac Book Pro I am considering purchasing one but my only barrier is the price- I understand that I will get unbelievable performance and quality as ever and I adore my Air, but I want to make sure that I ma not buying myself into the same issue again with the laggy DaVinci resolve ad having to export my videos to actually see what they look like without them lagging, glitching or not playing at all. SSD storage is not really a concern to me as I could go for minimum as I wont require huge ssd as I store everything externally or delete files when im donee with them. But RAM is a concern as I have heard that 16gb ram may not run DaVinci as smoothly as possible with no stutters or glitches and Chat GPT has advised me to go for 24gb Ram or even higher if my budget will allow it. I also will not be able to go for any higher spec regarding the chip so the standard M5 Pro will be what I am ideally looking at and if I definitely should and would regret not getting a higher RAM I will do so. So in short, should I buy the new M5 MacBook Pro with 512ssd and 16gb ram or should I extend my budget for better and go with a 512gb ssd and a higher 24 or more Ram

Posted on Oct 20, 2025 3:55 AM

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Servant of Cats

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Posted on Oct 20, 2025 3:35 PM

reubenjodie wrote:

Slightly in the dark on this if I am honest, I am a videographer who knows how to edit- the technical stuff might not be my most polished knowledge so excuse me if I should silly here but I store all of my files and videos, photos and whatever on a Sandisk external sd card which I dont have a reader for so I use the camera which is plugged into the laptop via a data cable which I then take the files and import to DaVinci- is this what you mean and do you think this may be the source of my issues?

SD-family cards and readers vary greatly in the speeds that they support.

SD Association – Speed Class

Even a V90 card (90 MB/s = 0.720 Gbps) is much slower than USB 3.0 (5.0 Gbps before overhead), let alone USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10.0 Gbps before overhead). A V90 card may be fast enough to record video clips in real time while it's installed in your camera, but if you are editing large video files, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 SSD, Thunderbolt 3 SSD, or USB4 40 Gbps SSD may be more suitable.

Many NVMe SSDs which attach via these interfaces are small. I have a Crucial X9 Pro that holds 4 TB, but that is the size of a credit card with the thickness of an iPhone. Some fast NVMe SSDs from other vendors look a bit like oversized USB flash drives. I would think that any of these would be easier to use for storage than a camera. The camera arrangement will be limited not only by the speed of the SD-family card, but by the speed of the camera's USB interface – do you know if your camera even supports USB 3.0?

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22 replies

reubenjodie Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 20, 2025 3:10 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I am very on the go so this might not be the best decision but do you think the Mac mini could be transported easily without much hassle? If it is a big deal to carry it around the place with a portable monitor I would rather spend more- Thanks so much for the reply!

reubenjodie Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 20, 2025 3:19 PM in response to MartinR

Slightly in the dark on this if I am honest, I am a videographer who knows how to edit- the technical stuff might not be my most polished knowledge so excuse me if I should silly here but I store all of my files and videos, photos and whatever on a Sandisk external sd card which I dont have a reader for so I use the camera which is plugged into the laptop via a data cable which I then take the files and import to DaVinci- is this what you mean and do you think this may be the source of my issues?