Good morning there.
I’m a little bit lost and I need your help please.
it’s for a personal project. I would like to do Upscale Video IA (1080p/4K) on anime videos (about 200 episodes of 20/30 min). I do this as an amateur. It’s my hobby.
Can a MacBook Air M2 (full best configuration in 24giga ram) keep up, or should I go for a MacBook Pro ?
The fact is i don’t need more power for other things and it’s true, i love the MacBook Air shape haha.
Thank you very much for your help and recommendations
Best thing here would be if you could provide a short sample clip (e.g. 5 mins and tell the preferred settings /model (as this can make a big difference).
So someone with a basic M1 or M2 and with a “Pro” could do tests and you yould then approximate/extrapolate the time needed for a 30 mins clip.
Hello, do you mean put an entire episode that would be upscaled so that you can see or just 5min of the episode?
I would not recommend getting a Mac especially for Video AI. Getting a notebook might make things even worse. For the price of a MacBook you get a big PC with better cooling and gpu power.
But then he explicitly said that this is just as hobby.
Maybe he’s into the Apple ecosystem for all other things or even professionally.
And, apparently he wants a mobile device (even an ultramobile one with the stated preference for the Air) - so I guess a stationary PC is out of the equation, anyways.
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Better 5 mins to keep file sizes small.
Yes i want to keep
The apple eco system. Don’t want a PC 
As i said it’s just in amateur
I had Mac only between 2008 and 2018. They all were expensive but not very reliable. First quality issues appear often within a few weeks and the Mac’s stop working to the point of no return after 3,5 years average:
- PowerBook G4 Titianium: was okay!
- MacBook white 2006: 50 documented quality issues
- iMac 2008: screen issues after a few months
- iMac 2011: screen issues after less months, dvd drive and card reader defect
- MacBook Pro 2013: row of keys stopped workin after 5 years, card reader defect
- MacBook Pro 2018: butterfly keys fell apart after 3 years
- iMac 5 k 2015: died with a loud BANG after 3,5 years
That might be your experience, overall this looks very different. Just look at all those reports of burned 4090 cards (and then compare this to the low market share because of the quite absurd prices of those GPUs).
And, I don’t understand why you keep wanting to talk him into a windows system when he expressively stated that he doesn’t want one?
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A basic M2 config will not be very fast but might be fast enough if you don’t have time constraints. Of course you should keep the MacBook on power supply - then you can have a long queue of encodes running over night.
Plus, and this is quite an advantage of the Apple Silicon vs. the windows system I have for comparision (Intel i7 13700 / RTX 4600): the mac stays fully useable while those encodes run as Topaz is using nearly 100% GPU but onyl little CPU time - on the windows system it uses sometimes more CPU than GPU.
So on my MacBook with M1 Pro I can use the Laptop during an encode for office tasks / webbrowsing,… and (apart from the running fans) don’t notice that a Topaz encode runs in the background while the PC does partly get somewhat sluggish in even desktop operation.
I am getting too old for the “my computer is better than yours” fights. We saw those between ATARI and Amiga back then and now it’s Apple vs. Windows?! Without me. Have fun. 
Well, but it was YOU that started this discussion 
:
From the Start post:
That was a clear question. Nowhere did he ask for the comparision with a windows or a stationary system. And afterwards he even expressively stated that he wants to stay on MacOS, so?
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More on-topic again / @pixelpopz
If you use a Mac you should know that currently (but also for quite some time now… 
) the Iris model is really slow.
For anime I guess you’d use Proteus anyways - or Gaia which is slow on all architectures - so this doesn’t matter that much.
Actually I will use Topaz or Waifu2x or Real-rsgan.
I do not know yet. This is a project I am embarking on.
I had a non-retina Macbook pro mid 2012 and I couldn’t do that correctly.
I have never touched the software you are talking about. I will study that
Here is the link to the project I would like to do (I’m sure you will recognize haha)
Any ideas ?
Hi, I just tried upscaling some of your video on my 15’’ M2 MacBook Air (8 GB) using the Artemis model and I got about 15 fps. The “memory pressure” was a bit high due to my limited 8 GB but if you went for the 24 GB model there would be no problem at all. You could leave it running in the background and still carry using the machine as normal. You might want to consider the 14’’ M3 MacBook Pro with 24 GB as that works out only £100 more. I like the MacBook Air as it’s totally silent!
Thanks.
Andy
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Hello Andy, @07broom.fibulae
A very big thank’s to you for having take the time to test an upscale on your machine. Can i ask you how long did you take for this exactly 5min file ?
The machine has not heated too much or no loss of power?
The thing is that I don’t use a second screen. And a size 14 seems slightly too small to me. My current 2012 Macbook Pro is 15 inches too. A little hard to go down a size. Even if I’m aware that it’s only €100.
This is the encode done with Artemis HQ 2x upscale on my MacBook Pro with M1 Pro (10c/16c) and 16 GB RAM:
approximately 19 fps; 6:32 (min:sec) for the 5 minutes clip. Note that Artemis is the fastest model but for this type of video it seems very usable. Also I did not see a change in Quality when doing a 4x upscale that was big enough to justify the much slower encoding.
6min with a MacBook Pro it seems very good. I would like to know how much time with a MacBook Air
