N13, M4 MacMini, Blackmagic New Install Crashing

Hey all,
Have a very strange one in at our studios that we’ve been unable to figure out.

We have a brand new M4Pro Mac Mini here, and installing it like we do all our other macs. We have a bunch of rooms mostly running on Mac Studios. Thought we would try a mini.

We installed N13 latest.
We installed our limited plugin set which works fine on other macs (silicon based VST3’s) - and have tested with all plugins disabled.
We installed Blackmagic Destop Video + drivers for our SDI outputs. This same little thunderbolt 3 box worked fine on a previous M1 Mini and M1Studio.
However, on very first load, play worked - but then as soon as we moved the cursor, we had spinning wheel - slowdown for 10 secs. Then when trying to playback, there was a crash.

Reopened nuendo. Disabled all prefs. Things look like they’re working. However, bring in a video file (which works on other systems here - always prores 1920x1080 Proxy) and video doesn’t playback and we get a crash when trying to playback a second time.

So we suspect its something to do with the blackmagic. The only caveat to that is the person doing the install thinks he got the same crash first time round before he’d even brought in a video file OR even set nuendo to output video. It could be a red herring.

Can someone provide a step-by-step for how we might approach this - and potentially what logs to look at? We have another mini arriving this week - will be interesting to see how that goes. It is just an output machine for assistant, but will be setup the same way as the studios.

Any help would be fab. I’m pretty good at following my nose and figuring things out - but this one has got me stumped. I’m not that familiar with things going wrong with video output - its always just worked here using decklink boxes. We do have a bunch of different output boxes here we can possibly try - and that will be my next port of call.

(All audio here is running on focusrite Red 8 line or Red 16 line boxes. That studio’s box is working 100% on other computers. I’m 95% sure this has nothing to do with the audio engine, but I’ve been wrong before)

Solved.
We tried 3 different sets of blackmagic decklink boxes with no change.
Then noticed that the driver version we had installed on the new mac was newer than our other machines.
We got rid of the new blackmagic drivers - and put on 12.8 - which is from Feb 2024. Only reason we went with that version is it is what is on all our other machines.

And wouldn’t you know it, everything worked.

So. This means that Nuendo 13.0.51, Blackmagic Desktop Video 14.4 and OSX 15.2 have some unpleasent interactions. I would guess that it is the blackmagic drivers at fault, but it could also be something in the nuendo video engine.

This is a link to the Steinberg support page, looks like they’re talking with Blackmagic about it.

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Brendan which CPU did you go for? M4 or M4 pro?
What’s your impression in terms of performance?

Not Brendan, but have had my mac mini M4 pro, 64GB 1TB for a month now. I went from a M1 Studio Ultra.

Nuendo performance is impressive. Just as geekbench numbers would suggest. So for Nuendo / Pro Tools work etc, you cannot go wrong with this little maniac.
I think also the basis M4 mini with as much RAM as it can take, will be a really cool DAW box. Just remember to get the 10GE nic.

Build quality is not the same as the monster M1 Studio Ultra.
And also if you need the same box to do some heavy DaVinci Resolve picture lifting, Studio Ultra is still better.

For DAW use I am very happy with the M4 pro. Impressive little bugger.

Hey Steven!
We have both here.
Currently have M4 pro in one of the studios, and its doing super well. Better than M1 Ultra and only limited by Ram. We’ve got the 24GB base on this one - but its more than enough for 99% of stuff. Our projects just don’t use that much ram, and we’re careful of not running other stuff (cough chrome cough) behind nuendo.

The M4 range sit right in the sweet spot for audio post production IMO. We are looking at trying the Pro out on a larger surround mix in the next few weeks, and I can’t see any reason it won’t be 100% sweet for such projects. I’d be surprised if a full Atmos mix with 400+ tracks would even be a problem. But we have not tested that - yet.

The greatest amount of issues we ever have here with CPU these days is always related to noise reduction, and the choices used. There are times we use real time noise reduction (not the time / budgets to treat things individually using offline methods) - and its cool until it isn’t. Think docos with LOADS of different locations, and denoising plugs on each of the different characters / tracks. There can be LOTS.

Verb is no longer ever even thought about. We never run out of CPU in that regard (compared to 10 years ago when you really had to think about how you were using verb / what types etc)

If there’s any tests you would like to try, we have M1 Ultras, Max and Vanilla, M2 Max, and M4 Vanilla and Pro all here with ram from 16 to 192GB.

Also 3D printing rack mounts for the mini’s… still figuring out a good enough power button mechanism (from the front) - but 90% the way there.

One of these days soon I’ll try find the time to do a full breakdown of the tech used at our little facility - and why we made the choices we did. Its def been the hardest part of our studios journey - and we have just this week finally got things to a point where I’m confident of the systems / risks - and with enough documentation that others can fairly easily work out whats going on.

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Thanks for the input guys! Looks like those little buggers are indeed OK.