M1 Mac Studio vs Mini Mac (& OBS 28)

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popestepheng

New Member
Curious if anyone has experience with the Mac Studio & OBS 28?

I go live a lot (mostly workshops, how-to & Q/A) so not a lot of gaming-style lives. But I do run Zoom at the same time, screen share, and would like to use the Virtual Cam to pipe the live stream into Zoom. Plus not have whatever I'm sharing (slides, gdocs, diagrams not slow to a crawl).

I'm am less experienced understand GPUs and graphics and if the new M1 Mac Studio provides that better level of encoding to get me where I want to go. I suspect it will but wondering if anyone has opinions on it.

Does anyone with some ideas on whether I'd be safe?

My old intel mac mini mostly works except the Virtual Cam is too slow to pipe the live show into a Zoom that is running at the same time.

Thanks in advance if you have any thoughts!
 
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thomaslfessler

Member
Yes, the Mac Studio will be much more capable than your legacy Mac Mini.

I have a Mac Studio Ultra, base retail configuration with 48 GPU Cores and OBS has a hard time maintaining 1920x1080 at 60FPS with an Apple Silicon ARM64 version of the app. This is not a RAM or CPU issue and is due to an unoptimal frame rendering path that's better suited to windows than macos. Respectfully so, obs consumes an extra ordinate amount of GPU utilization for scene rendering to output on MacOs compared Windows.

With that being said, give the MacStudio a try and see it it works for you. I opted for the ultra because I wanted 64gb of ram, a 1 tb ssd, and thought the extra gpu/cpu horsepower would future proof my purchase. Little did I suspect that the Mac Studio Ultra would be a minimum hardware spec for what I'm doing, as it's not that complex.

1080p 60 capture via the blackmagic ultrastudio.
Move transition
1 Display capture
1 Browser source for vdo.ninja
output via virtual camera
livestream to YouTube at 10,000 KB/s

The screenshot below was taken during one of my livestreams. Considering the CPU and GPU load, there is no way a Mac Studio Max and it's GPU could have been a viable option for my workflow.

1663567075531.png
 
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thomaslfessler

Member
One more thing, it looks like the Apple VT h264 encoder results in SLOWER rendering than the standard h264 encoder in OBS. Go figure. Something that should be faster, turns out to be slower.
 
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popestepheng

New Member
thomaslfessler said:
One more thing, it looks like the Apple VT h264 encoder results in SLOWER rendering than the standard h264 encoder in OBS. Go figure. Something that should be faster, turns out to be slower.
Click to expand...
Thomas thanks so much for the information!! Are you running this on OBS 28 with native apple support? Also what type of app are you capturing?
 
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thomaslfessler

Member
popestepheng said:
Thomas thanks so much for the information!! Are you running this on OBS 28 with native apple support? Also what type of app are you capturing?
Click to expand...
I have OBS version 27.2 that was compiled for ARM64 and OBS 28.0.1 and have them both installed on the Mac Studio Ultra and have been switching between them to find the best target for my 5x a week livestream. I'm still running 27.2 as I've seen redraw issues when capturing the desktop.

For showing mac based content on the livestream, I capture a 1920x1080 portion of a 4k monitor in a scene that's shared throughout a scene collection. That scene is placed, cropped and scaled down across many scenes using the set it up once and use everywhere. This ensures shared images and video maintain a clear and crisp image quality. In that display area I position Google Chrome, Quicktime, mac preview for images, and real-time PDF markup, etc. If it's from a mac app, I display it in this manner. Using a Browser scene component, I also use VDO.Ninja to add guests into my livestream that's sent up to youtube at 10,000 KB/s. I also share the livestream feed back to VDO.Ninja for the guests to watch the show in real time. To reserve GPU bandwidth for frame rendering in OBS, I disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome.

I think there is a 'leak' in the rendering pipeline in OBS, the amount of time to render a scene increases over time with no changes in OBS, just outputting to the virtual camera. A basic scene starts off at 2.8ms and over an hour or so, it can easily creep up to 6ms to 8ms in rendering time. The time to render a frame should remain consistent and not increase over time.

Here's a link to tonight's livestream... https://youtu.be/A6w-6SzlmX4
 
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popestepheng

New Member
Thanks for all your help -- I checked out the stream it looked pretty clean and smooth. So you think the ULTRA is worth the extra $2K?

And I suppose once 28 becomes more stable that will help performance even more, ya think?

Your channel is doing great! I'm about to hit 1000 subs.
 
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thomaslfessler

Member
Thanks for the reply and feedback. What's your channel's URL? I'd be interested in checking it out.

Getting the Ultra depends on what you are going to use your mac for. You could 'try' a custom configuration of the base model and see if it works for you. If it doesn't, you could go with the Ultra. I purchased from Apple with 0% interest over 12 payments that revenue from the livestream covers. In either case you may be waiting a bit to get what you want as there have been production backlogs on the Studio since it was release. Although, it may have gotten better in recent months.

For what it's worth, I may be an edge case as I don't see many live streams broadcasting at 1080p/60 fps with a 10,000 KB/s bitrate. While some say it's not necessary, it helps to set my content apart from the rest, with a level of visual production that I'm very happy with.
 
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thomaslfessler

Member
Good videos. I like your production style. Looks like you focus on videos, I opt for live productions as the revenue potential is much higher. Marketing is a sore spot for me to say the least. I've broadcast 700+ livestreams to date...

Quick observation: Your chroma key edges are a bit harsh and you end up looking sterile/unnatural compared to your background. Here is how I did it:

Chroma Key Camera Only Scene
your camera with chroma key filter applied​
I also apply a couple luts - 1 for a film contrast effect. 2 to reduce red in the camera feed.​

[Camera Shadow Scene - contains camera scene] This created a translucent shadow.
filters applied to scene: color correction:​
1663823469496.png
stream FX Blur​
1663823509624.png

CAMERA Scene - used across project - Camera + shadow
Chroma Key Camera Only Scene​
Camera shadow screen - behind the camera - stretched so it's a bit bigger​

Result: This will give you a chroma key with a slight shadow behind you. It can be stretched in one direction to give it a lighting effect.
It makes the chroma keyed camera look more realistic,

Next - The NV12 color format is horrible. Brings out unnatural red. We've found i444 looks the most natural. Also - the lights are too bright. It's blowing out the color on the right side of your face. I have two LED panels for my face and 4 lights for the green screen. Adding warmth to the lights for the face helps as well


1663824080048.png
1663824148740.png
 
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popestepheng

New Member
thomaslfessler said:
Good videos. I like your production style. Looks like you focus on videos, I opt for live productions as the revenue potential is much higher. Marketing is a sore spot for me to say the least. I've broadcast 700+ livestreams to date...

Quick observation: Your chroma key edges are a bit harsh and you end up looking sterile/unnatural compared to your background. Here is how I did it:

Chroma Key Camera Only Scene
your camera with chroma key filter applied​
I also apply a couple luts - 1 for a film contrast effect. 2 to reduce red in the camera feed.​

[Camera Shadow Scene - contains camera scene] This created a translucent shadow.
filters applied to scene: color correction:​
stream FX Blur​

CAMERA Scene - used across project - Camera + shadow
Chroma Key Camera Only Scene​
Camera shadow screen - behind the camera - stretched so it's a bit bigger​

Result: This will give you a chroma key with a slight shadow behind you. It can be stretched in one direction to give it a lighting effect.
It makes the chroma keyed camera look more realistic,

Next - The NV12 color format is horrible. Brings out unnatural red. We've found i444 looks the most natural. Also - the lights are too bright. It's blowing out the color on the right side of your face. I have two LED panels for my face and 4 lights for the green screen. Adding warmth to the lights for the face helps as well


View attachment 86873View attachment 86874
Click to expand...

Thanks for those suggestions -- I recently dropped the greenscreen all together but when I use one again I'll apply your tips thanks!!
 
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TFE

Member
I have a Mac Studio (base model) running OBS 27.2.4 via Rosetta for two, two-hour livestreams per week at 1080p 30fps 4.5kbs using the Apple VT H264 hardware encoder. It's a four-camera (all 1080/30) show, plus a video input (1080/30) for slides and videos in Keynote from a separate laptop, and 18 multi-layer scenes that I switch between while hosting by clicking with a mouse on Multiview. I have a guest for most shows, either via Skype or Zoom (prefer Skype because of NDI and less video compression). Previously (when I had an M1 Mac mini and the Intel iMac before that) I ran Skype on a third laptop to ease the load on those CPUs/GPUs. With the Mac Studio, I have no problem running Skype on that same machine while running OBS, using Virtual Camera to send the program to Skype (or Zoom) — no problem at all. While streaming the CPU runs under 10%, with no fan noise from the Studio. If you put you hand near the rear grille on the Studio you can barely feel a cool breeze. During the two-hour show it barely drops any frames, (rendering, encoding, or network), never more than an average of 0.0%.

Sorry, I have no use for, and hence no experience with, a green screen.

Things currently work so well, that I am in no rush to update to the much anticipated OBS 28 because of how well the current set-up works, and concerns with the various plug-ins I currently use not yet updated. Indeed, when I click on Help/Check for Updates, OBS returns "You're Up-to-Date" so I will wait until at least the updater thinks I should move up to it. Even then, I will try it first on the Mac mini just to be it works well with Apple Silicon and the plugins I use.

Hope that helps. DM me if anyone needs more on the foregoing, or has any advice for me! Thanks.
 
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thomaslfessler

Member
I just finished a 2 hour livestream, sharing the warm and toasty temps from the MacStudi. I'd say i'm about 40 degrees from a nice cool breeze.

1664594822234.png


With OBS sitting idle and no longer broadcasting. It looks like I just reproduced the bug where rendering time starts to escalate without a good reason.

1664595136374.png
 
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archimac

New Member
Are you running v28 native ARM? I am thinking about getting a Mac Studio. Obviously, I should wait until this bug is squashed.
 
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