Slow and noisy 480p rendering on MacBook M4 Max with Premier Pro

Hello...


I have big problem with my 3 days new MacBook M4 Max - 36GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 14-CPU, 32-GPU and 16-NE.


I'm professional video editor, so I bought this machine for my everyday workflow. When I tested my MacBook today in Premier Pro for the first time I was really shocked... 3 days ago I created video only with footage from camera for review, on my computer at home with Windows. Today I want to render it, only for a review in 480p on hardware encoding in Premier Pro and the render really takes like 3-4 hours to render. It is like only 1 hour and 10 minutes long video only with footage and few texts. Yes... and I'm not even talking about the noisy fans. It is like Airbus on airport really... Why? It is only very easy render in 480p, not 8K footage. The MacBook also gets very very hot.


Before I bought this Mac, I read lot of several reviews about how it was the best machine for work, for video editors and like it was very quiet and now, I see the opposite... In Premier Pro Mac is really smoothly, but the rendering is not normal I think.


My MacBook is always plugged into the adapter. I read that it is so much better for battery. For the first time I wanted to keep it like between 20%-80% but this is supposedly much better according the reviews. Another thing that I have plugged in my Mac is a hub for my ethernet cable, display ports (which I'm not using at the moment because I am not at home) and my very powerful external SSD from SanDisk, size 2TB. I rendered the video directly into it.


I thought that if I buy this beast like M4 Max for about 2700$, then there will be no problem with it, now I'm more disappointed than happy..


I'm desperate and I don't know what to do with it, I don't want to go back to my computer, I want to work on a Mac like many other professional editors...


Thank you for your helps and tips.



[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Problem with MacBook M4 Max - Very noisy rendering in 480p, with no effects in Premier pro. 60 minutes long video and render in 480p is take like 30 minutes of long noisy rendering.

MacBook Pro 16″

Posted on Jul 20, 2025 02:53 PM

Reply
6 replies

Jul 20, 2025 04:54 PM in response to Filip-

It sounds like you have a media or Premiere Pro problem, not a Mac problem.


You said you created the video on a pc ... what was the original source of the video (camera), what pc app did you use and how did you output the file ...


The file you exported on your pc & brought into Premiere Pro on your Mac ... what container type is it (MP4, MOV, etc) ... what codec did you use ... what was the size/resolution (1080, 4K, etc) ... was the video fully rendered on output from the pc? Can you play the pc video (output) file in QuickTime on your Mac without problems?


Do your sequence settings in Premiere Pro match your source clip(s) or are they different?


What do you mean by "noisy rendering"?



Jul 21, 2025 01:26 AM in response to Filip-

The Adobe community forum has answers...


Adobe Premiere Pro 2025 isn't optimized for the ne...

Adobe Community

https://community.adobe.com › Premiere Pro › Discussions


This suggests that newer builds of Premiere are not yet fully optimized for the M4 Max architecture — or at the very least, the Metal rendering ...

13 answers

 

· 

 

Top answer: 

I'm getting pretty fantastic performance on a 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 Max 128GB/4TB

Jul 21, 2025 01:17 AM in response to MartinR

I normally edit in Premier Pro on my PC too. At home I created a project with 4K footage from DJI Osmo cam. Then I had go away, so I shared the Premier project to google drive on, then I downloaded on Mac with the footage. I opened it and make a few more texts layer to project, I waited for the cache audio files to download and export it for review. I only exported in 480p to make it fast and It took like 3-4 hours..


All the footage plays normally in QuickTime.


With noisy rendering I mean that the Mac is really loud while rendering. Mac is very hot and the fans are so loudy. If I render in 8k I would probably understand, but in 480p this is not normal.

Jul 21, 2025 01:25 AM in response to Filip-

Filip- wrote:

Hello...

I'm a professional video editor, so I bought this machine for my everyday workflow. When I tested my MacBook today in Premiere Pro for the first time, I was really shocked...


You’re likely referring to Adobe Premiere Pro.


Minimum and recommended system requirements for macOS ; Memory. 8 GB of RAM. Apple silicon: 16 GB of unified memory; GPU. Apple Silicon: 8 GB of ...


Premiere Pro system requirements


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Slow and noisy 480p rendering on MacBook M4 Max with Premier Pro

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