I put the Sony FX5 in direct Texas sunlight recording 5K open gate RAW at almost two gigabits per second and tried everything I could to make it overheat. The body hit 135 degrees and the camera never flinched.
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The Nikon ZR costs less than half what the Sony FX5 does and records higher resolution RAW. But compression, dynamic range, and the long-term cost of storage complicate the math more than the sticker price suggests.
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Dell’s 52-inch U5226KW ultrawide packs a color-accurate 6K panel that can genuinely replace two monitors. Here is how it holds up for real video editing, and where it falls short for HDR and gaming.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am about to show you how to de-age anyone and make them look 10 years younger in DaVinci Resolve in just one minute. If you have a client that you’re making a video for and they want you to airbrush them a bit and make them look younger, that used to require a ton of work. Now, you can do it with a single effect in DaVinci Resolve.
Before we dive in, if you want to master your editing workflow, make sure to check out my Edit Videos Like A Pro Guide. It’s a free resource that will help you level up your videos fast.
The New Face Age Transformer
First, open up DaVinci Resolve. You’ll want to be finished with the editing phase of your video before applying this because it requires a significant amount of computer processing power. Applying it to the exact clips you need at the end of your workflow will keep your playback from slowing down too much.
Head over to the Color Page and create a new node. Open the Effects panel in the top right and search for “face.” This will bring up the Face Age transformer. Drag that onto your node. To get started, click Detect Faces in Frame. This will place a tracking box around any faces in the shot. If you have multiple people, you can simply click the specific face you want to work on.
Once the face is selected, click the Double Arrow icon to track the face forward and backward. This ensures the effect stays locked on your subject as they move around the frame.
De-Aging Your Subject
Under the Age Shift settings, you’ll see an Age Offset slider. This is where the magic happens. By default, it might set the age to 30, but you can adjust the base age to match your subject. To make someone look younger, move the offset to a negative number like -10 or -20. Just like that, wrinkles are softened and the skin looks much younger. It’s honestly wild how well this works.
You can even go the other way and make someone look older if the story requires it. You can even keyframe this effect. If you want a shot like in Lord of the Rings where a character transforms in real-time, you can now do that with a few clicks.
While this tool is incredible for touch-ups, keep in mind that if you are doing heavy color grading or using LUTs, you’ll want to make sure your node structure is organized so your skin tones stay natural.
Limitations to Watch Out For
There are two main things to keep in mind. First, don’t go too extreme. If you try to make a 60-year-old look like a 20-year-old, the AI will over-soften the face and make them look a bit like a weird baby. It’s best to keep the adjustments subtle for the most realistic results.
Second, this effect only applies to the face, not the hair. If your subject has gray or thinning hair, the AI won’t change that. It only removes wrinkles and smooths skin textures.
Smoothing Out Your Playback
Because this is a heavy AI effect, your playback might stutter. To fix this, go to the Playback menu at the top, select Render Cache, and set it to Smart. Wait for the red bar on your timeline to turn blue, and you’ll be able to watch your results in real-time without any lag.
If you feel the effect is a little too “digital,” use the Global Blend slider. This acts as a master opacity for the effect, allowing you to dial it back until it looks perfectly natural.
For more tips on how to use the latest tools in Resolve, check out my other DaVinci Resolve tutorials on the blog!
Dell just released the dream monitor for video editors. It isn’t cheap, but it checks literally every single box you could ever have for editing and color grading, it can calibrate itself, and you can game on it too. This is the Dell U3226Q, and in this post I’m going to be reviewing it from the perspective of a video editor who also games some on the side.
Also, for the sake of ethics: this post is not paid or sponsored by Dell, but they did send me the monitor so I could make this review.
Let’s start with the biggest reason to care about this monitor: it has an extremely color accurate OLED panel. Dell claims this is the world’s first OLED panel with an anti-glare, low reflection coating. That means it doesn’t have the glossy pop you’d get from an OLED with a glass screen, but as a professional who wants to minimize glare, if you work in a bright room this thing is going to block more light and be much easier to see. It also comes with a detachable monitor hood to cut back on even more light hitting the screen, which is great.
If you’ve never used an OLED before, just know that OLED is pretty much the peak of display technology right now. You get a virtually unlimited contrast ratio with bright highlights and perfectly dark shadows because the pixels themselves can turn completely off when showing black. There’s no halo or ghosting effect like you’d get on an IPS panel.
Everything in display technology has been moving toward OLED for years. Phones have used OLED displays for years. If you’re watching my YouTube video right now on your phone, you’re probably watching it on an OLED screen. OLED TVs are what most people want to buy, and I’ve personally had one for several years and love it.
So when I say this Dell monitor is designed to leverage all the strengths of an extremely high-quality OLED panel in ways that will truly benefit you as a video editor, including a bunch of features they aren’t even advertising, I mean it. This may be the last monitor you have to buy for a very long time.
Dell claims this monitor covers 100% of the sRGB color space and 99% of DCI-P3, both of which really matter for video editors. When I tested it with my Spyder color calibrator, I’m happy to tell you those claims were accurate. This screen delivers extremely accurate colors that look exactly how they should.
But here’s the thing: even with an extremely color accurate monitor that comes calibrated from the factory, I always recommend color calibrating any screen you plan to use for color grading. Monitor colors shift over time, it’s just a fact of screen technology. Colors can get warmer or cooler, the tint can shift more red or green. I’ve literally had it happen where I went too long between color calibrations, rendered a video, played it back on another computer, and thought “wait, these colors look a little funky.” Then I’d need to recalibrate to get things back to normal.
And color calibration can be a pain. You have to buy a color calibrator for a few hundred bucks, install the software, and then every few months remember to reconnect the calibrator and rerun the calibration. Most calibration software has a little nagging pop-up that appears to remind you, and I have lost count of the number of times I closed one of those pop-ups because I didn’t have time to deal with it.
And don’t even get me started on managing monitor ICC profiles and making sure each monitor is using the correct one, because you wake up one day and your operating system has chosen a different one for some reason and everything looks completely different until you track down the problem.
Let me know in the comments if you identify with that annoyance, because here’s where this monitor blows your mind.
If you’ve been wondering why the bottom bezel on this monitor looks slightly thicker with a weird cut-out rectangle, strap in.
With this Dell OLED, you do not need to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a separate color calibration tool and awkwardly dangle it over the front of your screen. This monitor has one built in, and it is so cool.
Whenever you want, you can press the joystick on the back of the monitor to open the menu, select calibrate, and the monitor will pop out a tiny motorized camera on a stick from the base. It analyzes the pixels on the screen and color calibrates itself at a hardware level.
What does hardware level mean? There are two types of color calibration: software and hardware. Software is where you buy a separate calibration tool, plug it into your computer’s USB port, install software, and whenever you calibrate, the results are saved as one of those annoying .icc files where you’re at the mercy of your operating system to actually use them correctly.
Hardware calibration is completely different. When you calibrate the monitor, the result is saved as a look-up table (LUT) to the monitor itself rather than to your computer. You don’t need any software on your computer for it to work. And if you switch between using a laptop and a desktop, you don’t need to have color calibration software installed on both machines. Just plug either one into the monitor and it’s going to display accurate colors, because those colors are saved to the monitor, not the individual computer.
Pretty cool, right? It absolutely blew my mind when that little camera stick popped out for the first time.
But we’re not done with the annoyance-fixing, because half the pain of color calibrating is the external calibrator and software, but the other half is just remembering to actually do it. Remember that annoying pop-up reminding you every few months?
Here’s what I think is truly magical about this monitor: you can set it to color calibrate itself on a schedule, completely automatically, with no input required from you at all. You can schedule it to calibrate every 200 hours, or quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even daily depending on how color-critical your work is.
You literally never have to think about color calibrating your screen again. Every time you sit down to color grade, you know the colors are accurate because the monitor has been keeping itself calibrated. Suddenly this monitor’s price starts to seem a lot more justified, doesn’t it?
None of that would matter if the monitor didn’t support the color spaces you actually use when color grading, and that’s another area where this monitor feels purpose-built for video editors.
Open the menu and you’ll find presets for digital cinema like DCI-P3 with gamma 2.4 and 2.2, presets for YouTube like sRGB, photography with Adobe RGB, and broadcast video standards like Rec.709 and Rec.2020. There is so much control here, and it’s far more advanced than just picking “vivid” or “flat” on another monitor.
And then there’s HDR. It supports multiple flavors: HDR10 and HLG both with 1000 nits of brightness, Dolby Vision, and DisplayHDR True Black 500, a display standard designed for extremely accurate shadow detail while still getting quite bright at 500 nits. If you want to color grade in both standard and high dynamic range, this monitor handles basically all of it.
Are we done with video features? No, because there are hidden settings in the menu that I haven’t seen anybody talking about or Dell advertising anywhere, but that are going to be extremely useful if you’re a filmmaker.
Here’s the context: if you want to buy an OLED reference monitor for on-set use, SmallHD will happily sell you one for an eye-watering $13,000 at the time I’m writing this. You get stellar visual quality and all the extra software features you’d expect from SmallHD, like scopes, overlays, and markers. It’s great, but you pay a lot for it.
Now with that $13,000 price in your head, this Dell OLED comes in at roughly one-fifth of that price and includes masking and marker overlays.
You can go into the monitor settings to add a 2.35:1 overlay, a 4:3 overlay if you’re outputting open gate, and more. You can also enable a mask that dims the parts of the frame that won’t be included in the video if you’re filming in an aspect ratio like 2.35:1.
I genuinely don’t know why these features are included on this monitor, but I’m not complaining. It definitely doesn’t have the fancy SmallHD OS, but it also doesn’t have the price. I’m not saying you have to buy it for that reason, but it’s really interesting that Dell included it.
Usually with a higher-end video editing monitor you have to make compromises, where color accuracy is great but the refresh rate is terrible. I’ve seen monitors with good colors that maxed out at 30hz or 60hz.
This Dell OLED combines an extremely color accurate and vibrant HDR screen with a 120hz refresh rate, 0.3ms response time, and VRR support. For most people who want to edit videos and game on the side, you’re going to be really happy with it.
To be clear, it’s not going to keep up with the more gaming-focused OLED monitors out there today with refresh rates at 240hz or higher, but those gaming monitors don’t offer the same level of color accuracy and built-in hardware color calibrators either.
A monitor is only as good as the ports it has, and you don’t have to worry here. You get 2 HDMI 2.1 ports, 1 DisplayPort 1.4 port, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus a full USB hub with USB-C and USB-A ports that pop out of a hidden cavity on the back. It also has a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port, really rounding out the hub experience. It comes with a DisplayPort cable, HDMI cable, and USB-C cable in the box.
The stand is sturdy with no wobble, and it can rotate, raise and lower, and tilt vertically. Controls are minimalistic: a power button and a joystick on the back that doubles as a button, plus three capacitive buttons on the bottom left of the bezel that you can assign to whatever you want for quick access.
The only thing missing is speakers, but honestly monitor speakers are bad 99% of the time anyway, so it’s not a big loss.
Let’s talk about the one concern you might have with an OLED monitor, and that’s burn-in. This is where a static image on screen becomes permanently visible, even when you’re doing something else. If you have grandparents who always have the news on, you may have seen this where the TV looks like it permanently has a news ticker at the bottom even when you change the channel.
With OLED screens, burn-in was more of a problem in the past due to the fragile nature of organic pixels. That said, in the last 5 to 10 years, burn-in reduction technology has gotten significantly better. TVs and monitors now have special refresh modes that run when the screen is off to help keep pixels from burning in.
This Dell monitor offers a pixel refresh feature that automatically runs whenever it goes into standby mode, and by default forces a pixel refresh every 24 hours. You can even set it to every 12 hours if you want to be extra careful.
My OLED TV has had zero burn-in issues after years of regular use. That said, a computer monitor is different from a TV because you’re more likely to leave it on all day displaying a static image like a dock at the bottom of the screen. This monitor has additional burn-in protections for that, including the ability to dim the screen or even dim only static areas like where the dock sits.
My recommendation if you’re worried about burn-in: hide your dock and menus until you mouse over them, set your desktop wallpaper to rotate through different images, and set your monitor to turn off when you’re not using it. Do those things and I would really not expect any issues, because the monitor will refresh its pixels whenever it’s off.
Let’s talk price. This monitor comes in at $2,600 at the time of writing, which is on the higher end for a professional monitor before you get into ultra-niche reference monitors that cost $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000.
Here’s something I’ve found to be true in my technology-loving life: once you go OLED, you won’t go back. I feel the same way about this monitor as I did when I bought my first OLED TV. The contrast is too perfect, the colors are too good. Pointing a camera at it can’t do it justice, you really have to see it with your own eyes, and once you do and get used to editing on it, you won’t ever want to go back.
The good news is that OLED monitors keep dropping in price. You can get an extremely color accurate OLED for around $500 to $1,000 right now that will work great for color grading. But those budget OLEDs won’t have nearly the same features that make your life easier as a professional.
You’ll still need to color calibrate your monitor. You can buy a separate calibration tool and try to remember to do it every few months, or you can buy this Dell and have it calibrate itself automatically as often as you want, to the exact color space you’re editing in. It supports more color space presets than most monitors. Throw in the markers and overlays for different video aspect ratios, and this Dell OLED makes a really compelling argument for the price.
It’s going to save you time as an editor. And if your time is money, which I know most professionals feel strongly about, I think the Dell U3226Q is the monitor you should buy.
I’ll link to where I found the best price for this monitor down below, along with my monitor buyer guide to help you save time and money. And if you’re a video editor, check out my Edit Videos Like a Pro guide as well, which is completely free to download.