If you want to buy a Mac Studio in 2025 for 4K, 6K, 8K, 12K or 17K editing, yes, we are up to 17Ks now, I have three recommendations for you at three different price points. An extremely budget friendly option, a best bang for your buck option, and an absolutely beastly option that will handle literally any type of video you throw at it.

Everything is linked below so you don’t have to go hunting, because I respect your time like that.

Budget Video Editing Mac Studio Alternative

Spoiler: this one is not a Mac Studio at all. But it is so powerful and so affordable that I have to mention it.

If you are only editing HD and 4K footage in H.264 or H.265, and you are not editing 6K or 8K, and you are not editing raw or ProRes, then I would highly consider the base M4 Mac Mini. At the time of making this video it’s around $600, and cheaper than that on sale or with an educational discount.

It’s a very solid little desktop that’s going to handle 4K editing just fine, and on a budget it’s really hard to beat the price. You can also upgrade it to an M4 Pro chip and it will still be cheaper than a Mac Studio, and it’s still quite good.

Grab it here: Mac Mini at Amazon, at B&H, or at Costco. And if you want the exact specs I’d buy, I have a whole separate guide to that machine here.

Best Bang For Your Buck Video Editing M4 Mac Studio

Anyways, you didn’t click this to watch me talk about the Mac Mini. You want the Mac Studio, so let’s get into it.

For the best bang for your buck, the one that will give you phenomenal editing performance across the vast majority of formats and codecs, buy the M4 Max with the 14 core CPU, 32 core GPU, 36GB of memory and 512GB of storage. Feel free to bump the storage to one or two terabytes if you want, but I wouldn’t go above that. Just buy an external SSD instead.

You can grab that exact build at B&H here, and the external SSD I use is here.

Now you’re probably wondering why I’m calling the base model the best bang for your buck. Why am I not telling you to upgrade to the 16 core CPU, or add more memory?

It Comes Down To Encoder And Decoder Engines

For video editors, the single biggest thing affecting the speed of your edit is the dedicated encoder and decoder engines Apple puts on the chip. More encoder engines means your videos render faster. More decoder engines means your videos play back more smoothly, even with several clips going at once.

For context, that $600 M4 Mac Mini has one encoder engine and one decoder engine. The M4 Max Mac Studio has two encoder engines, twice as many, which is why it will be significantly faster at encoding and give you faster render times.

More good news. Ever since the M1 generation, Apple used the same technology for their encoders and decoders, so encode and decode speed was pretty darn consistent across M1, M2 and M3. With the M4 generation they finally upgraded those engines, making them faster and giving every M4 machine a real speed boost for video editing.

So back to the base Mac Studio. If you go in and upgrade the chip from the 14 core CPU to the 16 core CPU, you don’t get any more encoder or decoder engines out of it. It will be slightly faster because you have more CPU and GPU cores, sure. But look at the price. If you upgrade the CPU you’re forced to upgrade the memory as well, which adds another $500 to the machine.

So for a 25% increase in price you’re seeing a few percentage points of increase in speed, and I don’t think that’s worth it. Remember, we’re going for best bang for your buck.

That said, if we’re talking about smaller upgrades and you happen to have an extra $500 to $700, bumping the CPU to 16 cores and the memory from 36GB to 48GB or 64GB is not a bad choice, because in my opinion if you’re editing 6K and 8K footage these days, 64 gigs is a healthy amount of memory to have. It’s just annoying that you have to spend $700 extra to get there.

In short: the M4 Max with the 14 core CPU and 36GB is still the sweet spot, but if you’re editing a lot of 6K and 8K, don’t be afraid to go to 64GB.

Beastly Video Editing M3 Ultra Mac Studio

We have one more option, and this one is an absolute beast that gives you a crazy amount of power. If you edit 6K, 8K, 12K, 17K or raw video, which to be clear the cheaper M4 Max can handle, but if you want your editing to be as fast as humanly possible because this is your job and you’re making money from it, this is the one.

Now, I know what you may be thinking. Building a beast Mac Studio is easy, Matt. I just go down and select the M3 Ultra with the 32 core CPU and 80 core GPU, add 512GB of RAM, throw in 16 terabytes of storage, and drop a cool $14,000 on an absolute monster of a machine.

I have bought a car for less than that. I would not do it. I think that’s a massive waste of money, and I mean on the computer, not the car.

Instead, upgrade to the base M3 Ultra with the 60 core GPU, which was $4,000 at the time of making this video. Take the one off the front and you’re in business.

So how much faster is it? Here’s the easy part first. Remember those encoder and decoder engines? The M4 has one of each. The M4 Max has two encoders. The M3 Ultra doubles it again, to four encoder engines and two decoder engines, which significantly increases your editing and playback speed, and is especially helpful on very high resolution 6K, 8K, 12K, 17K and raw footage. If you shoot on a RED or a Blackmagic cinema camera in raw, I would definitely go M3 Ultra.

You can find that build at B&H here.

Now Here’s Where It Gets Complicated

All of Apple’s M4 chips got upgraded encoder and decoder engines, making them faster than the engines in previous generations. But what generation is this beastly computer I just recommended? It’s not an M4. It’s an M3. Which means it’s running the older, slower version of those engines.

So even though the M3 Ultra Mac Studio should be faster than the M4 Max Mac Studio, because it has twice the engines, it is not going to be as big of a jump as previous generations. And there may even be certain resolutions and codecs that render faster on the M4 Max, because while it has fewer encoding engines, they are faster ones.

Here’s a car analogy. The M4 Max Mac Studio is a four cylinder with a turbo. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is a muscle car with a V8. You’d assume the V8 wins because it’s a bigger engine, but the turbo four is generating its power much more efficiently, and sometimes it beats the V8 in a race. If you don’t understand cars that analogy probably wasn’t helpful at all, but it makes sense in my brain, okay? Ask Vin Diesel, that’s where I get all this stuff.

This is exactly why I think the M4 Max Mac Studio is really the best bang for your buck. It is literally half the cost of the M3 Ultra, and it is nowhere close to half the performance. It’s much closer to 75 to 80% of it.

Accessories And Where To Buy

Everything above is linked, and here’s the rest of the desk:

• External SSD for video editing
• The monitor I recommend
• Budget keyboard and my favorite keyboard
• Budget mouse and my favorite mouse

I also link to a company called Get Upgraded, which lets you buy MacBooks on an upgrade program, just like an iPhone, where you get a new MacBook every two years. It’s super cool and it doesn’t cost any more than buying the laptop outright with AppleCare, which is awesome. Figured I’d mention it if a laptop is what you’re actually after.

And finally, my Edit Videos Like A Pro guide is completely free. It covers the most important things it took me years to learn as a video editor, and it’ll help you regardless of which software you use or whether you’re on a Mac or a PC.