I just did my first game with action stitch and wanted to provide feedback for future users. I rendered a full game ~1.5hours with 2x GoPro 11 4k. It took approx 3.5 hours to complete. This is with a mac mini M4 Pro 14/20c with 64gb ram.
That sounds really nice. I have been using my 5800x3d with 32gb of ram and it takes just over 9 hours for ~80 minutes of 5.3k video from gopro 13 cameras stitched at 7500x2500. For point of reference I stitched the same video on a base model Mac Mini M4 and it took just over 7 hours. I’m thinking of buying a new M4 Mac (the mini isn’t mine) but am debating if the pro is worth the price increase. Anyone have a 12 core M4 pro to add to the discussion? Unless CUDA support happens the M4 Mac seems like a good way to go.
Wow! That is crazy fast. I have an older PC that is pretty strong, but aging, and it takes me about +/- 25hrs to render a single 1.5hr game using the GoPro 11’s @5.6k each (6 core-12 thread PCU, 64gb RAM). As far as I can tell, AS uses mostly cores and some RAM to render with no GPU usage at all. I’m curious what sort of rendering time other users are getting out of their PC setups? I don’t have anything Apple, but it ALMOST makes me want to buy a Mac Mini. Almost… 
I have been thinking of updating to a new system, but not exactly sure the route I want to take. @gchen , is it strictly the volume of cores that is making Chris’s rendering time so impressive?
I did a 5.3k gopro game last week and it still handled it quickly 7500x2500 resolution… I should note that I close out other programs (I ran windows 11 through parallels)… that way it has full resources.
Yeah, that’s about the res I use as well. I actually go talle, 3200-3600px to get more real estate on the top and bottom for tracking. I don’t use my PC much while rendering either, which is one of the reasons I was blown away to see ANYTHING under 8-10hrs!
Was the match length the same as the ~1.5 hours you stitched in your first post? What was the total time it took? Thanks in advance. Just trying to figure out how much benefit I would get by going with the M4 Pro chip vs the base model M4 chip.
So just to provide some more info here. I bought the Mac Mini M4 Pro 12 Core w/ 24GB RAM. Stitching the same footage I ran above takes just over 5 hours. Huge improvement. For doing it on a budget I would say it is hard to beat the base M4 Mac Mini which will do this in 7 hours and can be had for $450 if you live near a microcenter. But the M4 Pro is also impressive albeit at a hefty price increase.
Thank you for the info! I know NOTHING about Apple, but at $450 that sounds like a bargain! Are there differences between the systems, or if I simply look up “M4 Mac Mini” that would get me where I Need to be?
Flip side, has anyone running a PC been able to get render times like this? If so, what sort of system are you using?
I am very intrigued to spend +/- $500 on a TINY system to like the M4 Mac Mini to just have as a standalone computer so my main isn’t locked up for 24-27hrs at a time!
Also, sorry, are you offloading your footage onto the onboard SSD or are you using an external USB drive?
The $450 is the base M4 which is still very good, but my tests are with the M4 Pro which is about 3x the price or more. Any of the M4 chips will still be solid
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Correct. I was referring to the approx 7 hour rendering time would be using the $450 base version. That’s a steal I think. Not sure if you saw the other comment, but it’s that using the onboard SSD or and external USB drive? Meaning, with an external drive slow it down at all? I would assume not, but just curious.
A decent external drive will not slow it down… recommend a thunderbolt or new USB C type drive
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I use a network attached storage (NAS) for all my footage
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Thank you for all your info. It might be worth it to me to spend the money to speed up the time. One final question, and pardon my ignorance since I know nothing about Apple products, but do you run actionstitch natively or do you use some sort of a emulator to run a Windows version on the Mac?
It runs on MacOS… but follow the tutorial step by step… It also flips out over the license key every time i open it and I have to run a command to reset it… Just had to search the forum for the solution
Great! Thank you so much!
@joseph.forbish that is using the internal drive and then offloading the resulting file upon completion. For a 80-90 minutes of footage the raw files total about 66GB of data and the resulting output is about 4.5GB. Actionstitch also stores chunks of the video in a working directory while it is processing although I didn’t notice their size.