FAQ · worth it
Is Apple Silicon worth it for a video API?
When your bottleneck is Remotion Chromium or VideoToolbox, yes in our bakeoffs. When your bottleneck is massive fan-out parallelism, measure Lambda separately. When you only need elastic ops, small containers may still be the right default.
Remotion evidence
| Job | Output | M2 Max | M1 Silver1 | M1 Silver2 | CF live |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LongKinetic3m | 3:00 (5400 f) | 111.5 s | 133.7 s | 145.6 s | 2175.3 s |
| LongKinetic20m | 20:00 (36000 f) | 679.5 s | - | - | 14502 s PROJECTED |
LongKinetic20m CF column is PROJECTED (×20/3 from measured 3-minute CF live). Method: benchmark methodology.
Encode evidence
| Step | M2 Max wall | Docker CF-shape | CF $ (rate-card) |
|---|---|---|---|
| VideoToolbox H.264 8 Mbps (20 min src) | 95.1 s | N/A on CF Linux | - |
| libx264 medium CRF23 | 102.8 s | 2371.1 s | ~$0.0474 |
Canonical: VideoToolbox vs cloud encode.
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