M5 MacBook Air Review: Is It Worth It for Video Editors?

If you need an ultra portable laptop that can edit 4K, 6K, even 8K raw video with phenomenal battery life, the M5 MacBook Air is a surprisingly great choice. But you could also save your money and get 90% of the performance for a much cheaper price. I’m Matt Johnson, and in this post I’m reviewing the M5 MacBook Air from the perspective of a video editor.

For the sake of full transparency, this video is not paid or sponsored by Apple. I bought this laptop with my own money.

My Background: From PC to MacBook Air

Historically, I’ve been a PC guy. I still use a custom built desktop as my main computer for day to day editing, and that’s still true today. I’m on Windows 11 most days.

But there are plenty of times when I’m traveling and can’t bring my desktop with me. That’s when I need a laptop, and I used PC laptops for many years. Last year I changed things up and bought an M4 MacBook Air, because I wanted an ultra compact, lightweight laptop that was still powerful enough to edit video on the road.

That decision paid off. The M4 Air surprised me with how capable it was, especially considering it doesn’t even have a fan. Editing on this laptop over the past year has been quick and smooth, with phenomenal battery life. The only time I noticed it slow down was during rendering, mostly due to the lack of a fan for cooling. If you want the full breakdown of how that laptop held up, I covered it in my M4 MacBook Air long term review for video editing.

Why Upgrade to the M5?

So why upgrade? For me, it really comes down to storage. I’ve been extremely happy with the M4, but I only chose 500 gigs of storage when I bought it, and I constantly found myself juggling external SSDs while copying footage to and from the laptop. It was, in a word, inconvenient.

My fix was taking advantage of Apple’s trade in program. I purchased a brand new M5 MacBook Air with one terabyte of storage and got paid $755 for my M4. Not bad at all.

Build Quality and Design

From an overall build quality and construction standpoint, this laptop is stellar. It’s extremely well put together, the trackpad is fantastic, and the keyboard is a joy to type on. Apple has really dialed in all of the physical controls.

My only real complaint, and it’s one I can look past, is the port selection. Just like the M4 Air, the M5 has two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side. I can’t help but wish it had three, because as a video editor I’m constantly copying files from one hard drive to another, and more ports are always better.

SSD Upgrades: Bigger and Faster

One real upgrade the M5 MacBook Air has over the M4 is the SSD situation. The base price went up by $100, but with that extra hundred bucks, the minimum SSD size jumped from 256GB to 512GB. As someone who also owns a base MacBook Neo with only 256 gigs of storage, I can tell you that’s barely enough to get by. You will really appreciate having at least 512 gigs of space.

Another improvement is the addition of a PCIe5 SSD, which is much faster than the M4’s drive. If you copy a lot of files regularly, you’ll notice they transfer twice as fast, which is a genuinely great quality of life upgrade.

Display Quality for Color Work

The screen is a very color accurate panel, capable of hitting the full Rec709 and P3 color spaces by my testing, which makes it great for color grading. While the screen is a step down in quality from the higher end MacBook Pros, I’ve color graded dozens of videos on this screen over the past year and it can still easily get the job done without issue. If you want to take your color grades even further, check out my LUTs for a quick, professional starting point on any project.

Performance: CPU, GPU, and Memory Bandwidth

I really didn’t have any complaints about the speed and performance of the M4 MacBook Air for video editing, aside from slightly longer render times. From a software standpoint, importing footage into DaVinci Resolve, making cuts, and rearranging clips, the M4 was extremely good. But the M5 is a sizable jump in specs over the M4.

In Apple’s marketing materials, the CPU is about 10% faster, the GPU is 30% faster, and memory bandwidth is up to 153 gigabits per second, compared to 120 on the M4.

More importantly, and this isn’t something Apple advertises directly, the biggest factor affecting your editing and render speeds on an M series MacBook is the hardware encoder and decoder. In my testing, these encoders and decoders are noticeably faster on the M5.

That means less lag and smoother timeline performance while editing. When I tested DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut, I found the M5 MacBook Air easily handles 4K, 6K, and even 8K H.265 footage. Throw RED RAW and ProRes RAW at it, and it scrubs through footage just as smoothly as the M4 did, especially in Resolve and Final Cut.

Unfortunately, the base model MacBook Air is hard for me to recommend if you edit in Premiere Pro. I’d look at upgrading the memory to 24 gigs, which may help, or just look at a MacBook Pro instead, since that will run Premiere much more smoothly. I cover this exact tradeoff in more detail in my M5 MacBook buyer’s guide for video editing, which will help you land on the right model for your workflow and budget.

Export Speed Comparisons: M5 vs M4

This is where the numbers get genuinely impressive. Exporting the same 10 minute project on both laptops:

Final Cut Pro: The M5 was 17% faster than the M4, finishing in 3 minutes 33 seconds versus 4 minutes 10 seconds.

DaVinci Resolve: The M5 was 25% faster, taking just 4 minutes 15 seconds versus 5 minutes 18 seconds on the M4.

Premiere Pro: Slower than the other two programs overall, but still 40% faster on the M5 at 8 minutes 4 seconds, compared to 11 minutes 18 seconds on the M4. Premiere really likes a lot of GPU power and RAM.

Across the board, that’s anywhere from 17% to 40% faster on the M5 compared to the M4 when it comes to rendering.

AI Performance and Neural Accelerators

Apple focused heavily on AI in their marketing for the M5, since they’ve now included neural accelerators in every GPU core, which helps with AI workloads.

You might think that only applies to running a local LLM, and that’s true, but more importantly for video editors, a lot of editing software is incorporating AI powered tools and effects that run locally on your machine.

I tested this by loading the latest version of DaVinci Resolve 21 and trying its new AI powered face age transformer tool. The M5 scrubbed through clips with the effect applied significantly faster than the M4. There wasn’t quite enough of a speed increase to get fully smooth playback, but it’s a nice improvement and shows those AI neural accelerators are doing real work.

Final Verdict: Should You Buy the M5 MacBook Air?

Here’s my overall take. In my opinion, this is simultaneously the best ultra compact laptop Apple makes, but it’s also not a revolutionary upgrade over the M4.

If you’re coming from an M1 through M3 series laptop, you’ll be very happy with the M5 Air. But if you can find an M4 Air refurbished or on sale for cheap, that will give you a pretty similar experience for a much cheaper price.

If you’re still weighing your options across the whole M5 lineup, including the Pro models, take a look at my M5 MacBook Pro buyer’s guide for video editing for the full breakdown.

And if you want to level up your editing skills no matter which laptop you choose, grab my free guide, Edit Videos Like a Pro. It walks through the biggest rules I follow as a video editor to create better videos, and it’s completely free to download.

Best 4K Export Settings For DaVinci Resolve 2026

I’m going to show you how to export 4K videos in DaVinci Resolve in very high quality for YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, your clients, and more. And to save you a ton of time, I’ve created a set of free export presets you can download at the link below. They’ll give you all of these high-quality 4K export settings immediately, without you needing to dial everything in manually. They even come with instructions showing you how to import them into DaVinci Resolve!

Download the Free 4K Export Presets for DaVinci Resolve here!

Now let’s get into it.

Getting Started: Setting Up the Deliver Page

Open up DaVinci Resolve and create a new project. Once your 4K footage is imported and edited on the timeline and your video is ready to export, click on the rocket ship icon at the bottom of the screen to open the Deliver page.

Over on the left in your render settings, give your file a name, something like my4kvideo. Then select a location where you want to save your video so you can find it after it renders. For format, select MP4, and for codec, select H.264.

Mac Settings

If you’re editing on a Mac, you’ll see a checkbox that says Use hardware acceleration if available. Check that box. This tells Resolve to use your computer’s GPU to export the video, which means it will render significantly faster.

For resolution, make sure it is set to 3840×2160 and your frame rate is set to 23.976.

Now for the most important setting: Quality. This setting directly affects the quality of your exported video. Choose Restrict to, and type in the following bitrates:

  • 50,000 kilobits per second for a 24fps or 30fps video
  • 80,000 kilobits per second for a 60fps video

This gives you the highest quality video possible on YouTube while keeping the file size at the smallest I’d recommend. It’s the sweet spot.

Why You Should Always Upload to YouTube in 4K

Here’s something a lot of people don’t know: even if you didn’t film in 4K, I still recommend using these 4K export settings for basically everything you upload to YouTube.

If you upscale your 1080p footage to 4K before uploading, YouTube will use a significantly higher bitrate during playback, and the quality will be dramatically better than if you had uploaded in HD. This also applies to Facebook, Vimeo, and pretty much any other platform. Always upload in 4K. It will almost always help you.

PC Settings

On a PC, you’ve already set Format to MP4 and Codec to H.264. You may see different settings depending on the type of graphics card installed in your computer. You’ll have an Encoder dropdown that may say Auto, Native, Intel Quicksync, or Nvidia.

You can leave this set to Auto most of the time, but if you see an Nvidia option, select it because your GPU will likely render your video the fastest.

Leave your resolution at 3840×2160 and frame rate at 23.976.

For Quality, if you have an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, you should see the Quality setting with a Restrict to option. Use the same bitrates as above:

  • 50,000 kilobits per second for 24fps or 30fps
  • 80,000 kilobits per second for 60fps

What If I Don’t See a “Restrict To” Setting?

Don’t worry! If you only have a Native Encoder option, your export settings will look a little different. You’ll see a Preset and a Rate Control option instead.

For Rate Control, select Variable Bitrate. A Bitrate option will then appear. Set it to:

  • 50,000 for 24fps or 30fps video
  • 80,000 for 60fps video

And you’re good to go!

Rendering Your Video

Regardless of whether you’re on Mac or PC, once your settings are dialed in, click Add to Render Queue at the bottom, then press Render on the right side to export your video in the highest quality.

Save Time with Export Presets

Want to avoid having to dial in all of these settings every single time? You have two options.

First, you can download my free presets, which give you all of the settings we just covered ready to use as a preset every time you export.

Second, you can save your own custom preset inside Resolve. To do that, go to the top right of the Deliver page, click the three dots menu, and select Save as new preset. Name it something like 4K 24fps WhoIsMatt. From then on, anytime you want to use these settings, just select your preset from the menu at the top and you’re ready to export instantly.

If you’re looking to level up your overall video editing workflow, check out my Edit Videos Like A Pro Guide for more tips on working faster and smarter. And if you want to compare these DaVinci Resolve export settings against Premiere Pro’s, check out my guide on the Best 4K Export Settings for Premiere Pro 2026. For Instagram-specific exports in Resolve, I’ve also put together a full guide on the Best Export Settings for Instagram Reels in DaVinci Resolve 2026.