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.
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.