Adobe Premiere And Media Encoder Are Totally UNRELIABLE On Apple M1 Silicon macOS Monterey

 Premiere 22.6.2 and Media Encoder 22.6.1 have been pissing me off for the past few weeks. I had to take over this project that was started in Premiere, and I have experienced problems after problems with Sony MP4 and GoPro footage.

Image tearing up randomly, no matter what I try, it happens one way or the other. Premiere or Media Encoder, Silicon or Intel version, GPU, no GPU, Hardware accel, not accel, whatever I try, nothing works and I end up with tears and macro blocking on export.

I finally got fed up and transcoded everything to Apple ProRes. It's just 10 x the media size, whatever.

 Guess what. Freaking AME teared random images in the middle of random clips! I kid you not, this is not even edited, this is a raw MP4 clip from a Sony camera, transcoded to ProRes with AME.

And this is happening, at random:

What on earth is going on Adobe? Look at this macro blocking! Two minutes into a 10 minutes clip. This total crap goes on for a full 30 frames!!! An entire second of media screwed by Adobe.

This is a second attempt at the same transcode. Perfect. Wait, what???

Conclusion: Adobe is not ready for Silicon M1 Macs. Do not use Premiere or AME for reliable operation if you are on a Silicon Mac with Monterey.

Adobe, FIX THIS NOW!  And don't tell me it's Apple's fault. FCP and Resolve work reliably with MP4 footage. There is zero reason why this is happening but your laziness. At this point you should give me money to use your a$$ software, not the other way around.

Cannot Make Bootable Backups Of macOS System Anymore With M1 Silicon, macOS 11 Big Sur, And Forward

 I am stunned reading this explanation by Mike Bombich of the new way Apple is treating macOS security on Silicon Macs.

https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19/beyond-bootable-backups-adapting-recovery-strategies-evolving-platform

No more cloning your system on an external drive, ready for a quick swap in case of an internal system drive failure. With the help of CCC I was always ready in case of a catastrophe, well not any more!...

According to Bombich and Apple, "An Apple Silicon Mac won't boot if the internal storage has failed".

Read that again. Do you get it? Whoa, the ramifications are huge! A Mac lifespan now equals the lifespan of its internal storage. Since all current M1 Macs have a non replaceable ssd, that means when the ssd fails, the whole Mac is worth shit.

My Macs from 2009, 2012 are still functioning perfectly, I've swapped their boot drives countless times. How long is the life expectancy of a Apple NVMe SSD internal storage??? No one knows. Could be anywhere from 3-4 years to 9-14 years for the most optimistic. If it's the latter, OK. If it's less than that, no good.

Apple Care would extend the warranty after the first year, although you have to buy it 60 days after purchase, for the Mini it's $99 for three years, during which Apple will replace whatever hardware craps out, after that... good luck.

Replacing a Silicon Mini every 3 years I might stomach. Replacing a Silicon Mac Book Pro, iMac or future MacPro every 3 years? Forget it.

Also I've made an habit of starting with a clean install when upgrading macOSes: new drive, new OS, fresh start. It has served me well as all the small add-ons and stray files disseminated everywhere and accumulated along the years were zapped with a clean install. Now maybe that's not needed anymore, maybe that's what the new Apple compartmentalizing means: The macOS itself, being immutable, is not polluted by installs and stays clean no matter what. I hope so.

More reading:

https://tidbits.com/2021/05/27/an-m1-mac-cant-boot-from-an-external-drive-if-its-internal-drive-is-dead/

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/28/why-cloning-big-sur-isnt-as-useful-for-an-m1-mac/

macOS Monterey Is In The House, Mac mini M1 With Final Cut Pro 10.6.1 - Part1

 I started using Monterey, it's on a Mac mini M1 with 16GB RAM, 1TB internal ssd.

I have already edited real projects with FCP on it, and I'm running tests.

My current working machine is a Classic Mac Pro 5,1 with 6 x 3.46 GHz cores, 32GB RAM, Radeon 7950 3GB running Mojave 10.14.6.

I have skipped Catalina (10.15) and Big Sur (11) entirely since the cMP is not on the approved list, and I didn't want to risk using OpenCore. I also have a Intel i7 four cores Mini that I use for work, that also has Mojave installed as I didn't want to have mismatched macOSes on my work machines.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

• Boots insanely fast! Seventeen (17) seconds from pressing the power button to the log screen.
• Internal drive speed is nuts. 2800MB/s Read/Write!

• The compartmentalization of the internal drive is something to get used to. APFS introduced with High Sierra (10.13) is evolving. And starting with Catalina (10.15) the System Drive is Read Only! News to me! https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/working-apfs-volume-groups I'm not used to not being able to create a new folder at the root of the disk.
• Monterey is less elegant than Mojave. I don't know when Apple decided to make the change, I prefer the minimalistic icons of Mojave.
• Updating old FCP libraries hasn't been straightforward, often leading to errors:

And after the failed attempt, the Library is definitely corrupted. Make sure you make duplicates before attempting. 

My workaround: Open the library without the Media drive connected (I always store Media outside the Library, on an external drive.) Everything will be offline, but the update will go through without a hiccup. Then mount the Media drive, FCP will reconnect the media by itself, or if it doesn't, Relink the files.

• FCP is super fluid. No waiting time, everything responds very quickly. I dumped my media on a Sata SSD (getting 430MB/s on average) for the small projects I'm currently working on. It's all very fast editing anything, except for non optimized 4K media, R3D specifically. Haven't tried Proxies yet.
• Export times are greatly reduced, especially h264. Exporting to ProRes feels somewhat faster, but not as big a difference. I have to do a real test comparison.
• Compressor is missing some "legacy" Codecs. They are available through Rosetta. I haven't installed that yet.

• Resolve also wants Rosetta installed... Really? Well I don't need Resolve for now, so I haven't installed it yet.

• The Mini does not support eGPU, not a big deal since GPUs have been insanely overpriced for the past 2 1/2 years or even longer. F$*& the hoarders and their stupid bitcoins. Let's see what this M1 is capable of. The old i7 Mini only has a paltry Intel 4000 1.5GB Vram GPU, this new Mini should run circles around it.
• The M1 Mini has a HDMI out for a first monitor, and I can connect my second monitor via a Thunderbolt 3 to HDMI adapter. Leaving the second Thunderbolt 3 for DAS. It's working perfectly. If you need a third monitor you're out of luck as the M1 only supports two. That's fine for me.
• It is near silent. So much so that I now find rotating HD's noise annoying!
• Exporting h264 or ProRes doesn't start the fans, the box is not even warm. Compared to the i7 Mini which starts the fans as soon as Safari is open, and becomes as loud and hot as a steel plant when encoding h264 or ProRes, it's amazing!

That's it for now, more soon!