https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TD3_g8YIeU Other World Computing's Rocketyard has a great video and post for setting up an Editing system. Now of course as a company that sells products they are going to recommend their stuff, but since I mostly use their stuff anyway... Still it is a little dated since it recommends and iMac Pro (which is EOLed) and a top of the line Intel iMac will likely be faster anyway.
In a fairly surprising move, Apple has changed out 3 video cards for the Mac Pro and added 3 new models. You can see them at the Mac Pro Specs Page. They are an AMD RADEON PRO W6900X with 32 GB of RAM for $2400, an AMD RADEON PRO W65900X with 32GB of RAM for $5600, and a AMD Radeon Pro W6800x DUO with 64 GB of RAM for $4600. These are all very pro level current generation cards and should give a noticeable improvement to the graphics for those with a Mac Pro, and they all add 4 Thunderbolt 3 slots and can be linked together for more graphics power (and expense) I am glad to see that Apple is still doing some things to update the MacPro, now lets hope the rumors are true and they update the CPU one time before moving on completely to Apple Silicon.
Jason Snell at the awesome six colors blog has a great article on the fact that you are not backing up enough. And it is true, you need to be backing up in every way possible and with local and cloud based copies, just in case something happens. I use both Time Machine and Backblaze and even with that I can't backup everything. I don't have a drobo to be able to backup everything locally (my video is on a RAID 5, so if a drive fails I should be able to recover that, but even my Backblaze took the better part of a year to backup everything I had set to backup. Losing a drive one or a whole computer will be the lesson to get you to start backing up, but you need to backup as much as you can and as often as you can, preferable constantly!
As an editor at some point you are going to fill your hard drives, and before they get too full you are going to want to clear up some space and to do that you need to see exactly what is filling them up. To do that I have 2 really good paid utilities that you can use to see exactly what is taking up so much space on your mac. These are WhatSize and DaisyDisk. Now I have been using and continue to use WhatSize as my primary, mainly because I prefer it's interface. It is more expensive at $14.99, but it has a 30 day trial and works on Big Sur just fine. Why do iOS mobile sync's take up so much damn space? And it also includes a graph form interface if that is your thing, though I prefer the lists view which I find makes much more sense. DaisyDisk on the other hand is all built along it's graph view, which is very pretty, but I do find it much harder to use than the column view of WhatSize. It is very pretty, but column view just makes more sense to my mind. As an added bonus it also works on M1 Macs already. Both programs take a bit of time to scan a disk and then give you the results. As I have said I prefer WhatSize, but that is entirely your decision and you can try them both out before you buy, so... Either way being able to delve into your files and find out what is taking up so much space on your hard drives in a quick and easy way is tool every editor and graphics artist should have in their tool belt.
You learn something new every day, I didn't actually realize that this was now built into the Mac OS, as I have always used A Better Finder Rename (and awesome app with more power than this, but it costs $22.95 unlike this tip but if you do check it out also check out A Better Finder Attribute it's companion app). So check out this article by Macolm Owen at AppleInsider. Every editor will need to batch rename files at some point, and the fact that it is so easy to do in the finder now is an amazing thing.
I know this is a weird little thing, but it always bothers me. I sort my mail so that the newest is at the bottom (this was the default for Eudora which I used for many many years as my default mail program). Now Apple Mail if I sort so that the oldest is at the top, every time I open it it scrolls so that the I am seeing the oldest first. Just because I want my newest mail at the bottom of the list doesn't mean I want to see my oldest e-mail in my inbox every time I open the app! I know I should switch to newest at the top then, but I hate being told how to do things, and should be able to chose. Honestly it is a lot of why I don't like Final Cut Pro X, it is a program that forces you to do everything one way, as chosen by an engineer and not an editor. I like when there are many ways to do something as in Premier Pro and AVID. Don't tell me that the way I do something is wrong, put in many ways to do something and let me chose which way works for me, but especially don't leave a way in but handicap it! End of rant.
Sometimes your Mac is running badly and needs some maintenance, now there are a couple of paid utilities I fall back to (mainly TechTool and Diskwarrior, but I will post more about those later) but the first I run is always the free OnyX. Onyx is a GUI or graphical user interface for various terminal utilities. It is from Titanium Software and has different versions for each version of the OS. I always go to Maintenance and usually run everything except disk positions on desktop. It will quit all open apps and run. And the run will take a while, maybe even an hour depending on hard drive size, then will restart your machine. I run this when Premiere is being sketchy, lots of crashes, and the system just seems to be running wrong. It isn’t a utility for Premiere, but for your system overall.
Change Miller at 9TO5 Mac is reporting that the Xcode 13 Beta has a reference to scalable Intel Ice Lake Xeon processors, which would be a big upgrade from what is in the current Intel MacPro. It would be nice to see new video cards offered by Apple too since they are supporting more current video cards in the latest versions of Big Sur. The Mac Pro is supposed to be this upgrade-able machine, so it would be great to see Apple actually make some upgrades available before the completely EOL it. Otherwise all the upgrade ability talk was just bullshit, because they knew that Apple Silicon was coming. This would be a good boon to editors though to have one last MacPro with the best processor available.
Joe Rossignol at MacRumors has a report on several features that are only available to M1 macs. None seem like deal breakers, and the Portrait Mode blurred background could be something with the cameras, which would mean not supported on M1 Mac Mini. Apple has said they will continue to support Intel Macs for some time, but slowly removing features from Intel doesn't really seem like full support, and gives doubt to rumors of a final Mac Pro with newer Intel Processor.
OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn't have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).EDIT:Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.