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Had lots of fun trying to catch these Tree Swallows today.

I processed these in Capture One and experimented with Topaz Photo Ai 4 Super Focus (using the default settings). I think the results may be a bit extreme.

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Two weeks ago I got a Mac Studio M4 Max to run Capture One, Topaz Photo AI, and to explore shooting and processing video with the Alpha I II I picked up that day.

Here are the specifications of the Mac Studio M4 Max (base model) that I got.

Apple M4 Max chip

• 14-core CPU with 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
• 32-core GPU
• Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
• 16-core Neural Engine
• 410GB/s memory bandwidth

Media Engine

• Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW
• Video decode engine
• Two video encode engines
• Two ProRes encode and decode engines
• AV1 decode

I had considered getting the Mac Mini M4 Pro

Apple M4 Pro chip

• 12-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
• 16-core GPU
• Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
• 16-core Neural Engine
• 273GB/s memory bandwidth

Media Engine

• Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW
• Video decode engineVideo encode engine
• ProRes encode and decode engine
• AV1 decode

I'm not sure if I'm doing anything I couldn't have done with the Mac Mini, to justify the 35% difference, but I prefer to get too much than wonder if I got too little.

I'm not much enamoured with MacOS, but I just use it to open the apps.

Some differences I've noticed:

• Capture One is much faster on the Mac Studio than on my older Windows PC. Thinks like AI masking (subject, background, people) all happen instantaneously. The masking is done before I can select the parameters I want to affect (e.g., shadows, highlights).
• Topaz Photo Ai is also noticeably faster. I no longer need to choose Cloud Rendering. Rendering Super Focus happens locally (on the Mac Studio) in less than half the time it takes in the cloud.
• Video processing: I haven't done any comparison timing with Catalyst Browse, Topaz Video AI, DaVinci Resolve, but they are all clearly faster on the Mac Studio.