There were a couple of stutters and dropped frames here and there, and the export took a little longer than it would have done on the Mac mini, but it didn’t frustrate me once. The M1 MacBook Air breezed through the job. It’s worth noting that I didn’t detune my camera for the edit, either – I continued to work with the 10-bit, 4:2:2, 4K video of which my 16GB Mac mini had been making mincemeat. You know – the one with just 7 GPU cores and 8GB of unified memory. The only tool I had to edit that video was the aforementioned base-model M1 MacBook Air. It would be a real stretch after a long flight and the fast onset of jet lag, I’d have to watch the event, take notes, shoot the video, and then edit and publish it before even considering anything that could remotely be described as sleep.

On the day of my outbound flight, Apple held an event (they always do this when I travel), which meant I needed to publish a reaction video later that day. It wasn’t long before it was called into action. I therefore had no choice but to take the base-model M1 MacBook Air with the knowledge that I’d rely on it significantly for video editing during my trip.

Back then, my video editing machine was an M1 Mac mini, and, clearly, I wasn’t going to take that out on the road with me. To give this story some context, we need to head back to October 2021, when I travelled to Montreal for business. How would it fare on the road when tasked with some video editing? Could it live up to the base-model M1 MacBook Air’s surprising brilliance as a stand-in, grab-it-in-a-pinch video editing laptop? I wasn’t worried, either this particular laptop is my daily driver for all things non-production-related and I love it. Instead, I packed the base-model M2 MacBook Air – nothing else. This week, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and leave the 16-inch MacBook Pro at home while travelling in London. The reason for this is simple – I’m fed up with carting that huge laptop around when I travel. Regular readers will know that I’ve been toying with the idea of swapping my 16-inch MacBook Pro for the rumoured M2-powered 14-inch version next year.

How to take a video on a macbook pro