Severance was edited on a Mac mini

Apple has shared a story on its website detailing how the editors worked on the TV show Severence, and surprisingly, they’re using mostly mid-range Mac hardware.

Geoffrey Richman, an editor on the show, told Apple that he usually edits at home on an iMac by remoting into a Mac mini at a post-production studio in New York. He’s also used his MacBook Pro to remote in when he’s on location at a shoot.

While the stories he tells about the creative choices made behind the scenes are fascinating if you’re a fan, the intriguing aspect to most Apple nerds is that the post-production studio is running Mac minis to let editors remote into their Avid workstations (Avid is a professional video editing software).

Apple glossed over the specs of the machines, but I’d expect the production house to use the new M4 mini since they’re so small. If I’m right, I’d also expect them to be running the M4 Pro chipset since the extra GPU cores can help once you get many layers and effects running at once. That said, since this is a professional environment, I’d expect most footage to be edited uncompressed, so realistically, any M series Mac mini is probably getting the job done. The differences between specs would mostly come down to render time at the end of the project.

When it comes to the iMac that Richman uses at home, I’d have to guess that it’s likely the 27-inch 5K iMac since that device was geared toward video creators when it came out in 2019, so it’s relatively modern. While the new iMacs are more powerful, they have a smaller 21-inch screen, so I’d expect a pro editor to want a larger canvas to work on.

He could have an M-series iMac driving a larger display, but since he has an M-series MacBook Pro, I’d expect him to use that on the larger display. We can assume it’s a new MacBook since he talks about loving the battery life and the HDMI port. While other Macs have had HDMI in the past, it would take quite a miracle for that to still have what qualifies as “exceptional battery” since the non-M-series MacBooks with HDMI are very old now.

But even when he’s using that machine, he says that he’s still remotes into the Mac mini to run Avid, which is the most interesting aspect of this workflow.

It should also be noted that while Apple sent over the photo of Richman working at a Mac mini used above, that’s not the exact one used to edit the show and was just set up for the purposes of the Apple article. MobileSyrup has reached out to Apple to ask for more specifics on the computers used and will update this story with a response.

Source: Apple