[dansky]

I just arranged a selection of 4K H.264/H.265 clips in a 2x2 grid on a 8K timeline in DaVinci Resolve.

Playback works well - up to 60fps. However, export to H.265 creates a lot of Swap. Rendering went with 15-18fps. All videos on a SMB network drive but the GPU was the bottleneck for rendering.

Swap was even around 24GB with 5 videos which I tested first. Using 4x4K it went 9 GB before stabilizing at around 2GB. No effects or grading whatsoever - plain 4K60 SDR videos.

One single SDR 4K clip renders to 8K at 25fps. Using Superscale 2x makes that 0.5-1fps.

For 8K rendering you may be better off with 32GB RAM minimum or trying the M4 Pro model maybe with 24GB. For 4K/6K editing the base 16/256 M4 Mac mini seems sufficient when all video storage will be on external drives or network.

Edit: added single 4k->8K rendering performance

[ideashower]

thanks for checking! I think I'll get the M4 Pro and max out the RAM. I don't have the budget for whatever the future M4 Studio would look like, so this seems like a nice sweet spot.

[dansky]

I had a few OFX plugins and maybe had the browser running which may have impacted RAM. Depending on how much RAM you can keep free and the amount of grading on that 8K video you may be OK with the 24GB of the M4 Pro base model but yeah - more is always better though with Apple it's painful to add more of anything .. on a budget.