The Client
Chidi Nwosu is an independent filmmaker based in Enugu. Over the past four years, he has written, directed, and edited three feature-length films — all micro-budget, all made with serious craft. His most recent project had screened at two pan-African film festivals and earned a distribution deal with a streaming platform that shall remain unnamed. For someone working at the scale Chidi works at, that is a significant achievement.
He had done all of it — every cut, every color grade, every sound sync — on a 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB unified memory, 512GB SSD. It was a capable machine for its time. It was not, by 2026 standards, capable enough for what Chidi was doing to it.
The Challenge
The MacBook's problems were threefold. First, 16GB of unified memory is shared between the CPU and GPU. Edit a timeline with multiple 4K streams, color grading LUTs, and audio plugins running simultaneously, and you exhaust that pool rapidly. Chidi had learned to keep his DaVinci Resolve project settings conservative — lower resolution proxies, fewer simultaneous nodes — to avoid the system grinding to a halt.
Second, the 512GB SSD filled up constantly. Chidi was working with raw footage from a Sony FX6 shooting in Cinema Line format — files that eat storage aggressively. He had an external SSD array cobbled together from three separate drives, all connected via USB-C hub. The hub occasionally disconnected during intense read operations, which once corrupted a partial export of a film he'd been working on for six months.
Third — and this surprised Chidi when we explained it — the M1 Pro runs very hot under sustained load. Apple's thermal management on laptops aggressively throttles performance when the chassis gets hot. In Enugu's climate, editing in a room without constant air conditioning meant the machine was throttling within 20 minutes of starting a render.
He came to us after a conversation with a colleague who had used Sephora Systems for a photography studio build in Abuja. "I just want to stop losing time to the machine," he told us. "I want to edit. I don't want to manage storage and wait for exports."
The Consultation
Chidi's workflow was pure DaVinci Resolve — from ingest to color to Fairlight audio to final export. He occasionally used Fusion for VFX compositing within Resolve. His projects are long-form: his current film in post-production was 107 minutes of finished runtime, edited from approximately 14TB of raw Sony FX6 footage.
We discussed the switch from macOS to Windows. Chidi was nervous about it — he'd been on Mac since university. We spent time being honest: DaVinci Resolve is genuinely better on Windows with a proper NVIDIA GPU. Blackmagic Design's GPU acceleration in Resolve is heavily CUDA-optimised. The RTX GPU performance advantage over Apple's Metal GPU for Resolve-specific tasks is significant and measurable. He agreed to try it.
We also discussed storage architecture. His external drive situation was a risk — not just because of the hub disconnection he'd experienced, but because no one of his drives was backed up independently. If any one of them failed, he'd lose irreplaceable footage.
The Build
We built Chidi a dedicated DaVinci Resolve editing workstation for ₦6.1 million, installed and configured at his home office in Enugu.
- CPU: Intel Core i9-14900K — 24 cores for Fusion compositing and multiframe rendering
- RAM: 128GB DDR5-5600 — enough to hold an entire feature film's proxy timeline in memory
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 24GB — Resolve's CUDA acceleration transforms color grading performance
- Storage (primary): 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe — OS, Resolve cache, active project
- Storage (media): 2× 8TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs in RAID-1 mirror — all raw footage mirrored
- Storage (backup): 1× 16TB HDD for offline cold backup, swapped weekly
- Case: Fractal Design Torrent — designed specifically for maximum airflow without fan noise
- Cooling: 360mm AIO — sustained render loads held below 72°C even in Enugu ambient temps
- UPS: APC 3000VA with AVR — handles the 4090's peak 450W draw without flinching
We installed and configured DaVinci Resolve 19, set up the project library on the NVMe cache drive, pointed media bins at the IronWolf array, and spent two hours with Chidi showing him the differences from his MacBook workflow. The learning curve was smaller than he expected.
The Result
Chidi messaged us six days after delivery. His current feature film — the one that had been painful to work on for months — had its picture lock exported in 2 hours and 14 minutes at full 4K Cinema resolution. On the MacBook, a similar export had taken over 19 hours and required him to leave it running overnight.
He was color grading in real time using nodes that would have forced the MacBook into dropped-frame playback. His Fusion compositing — a VFX sequence he had been avoiding because it was "too slow to work with" on the MacBook — he completed in a single afternoon sitting.
The RAID-1 storage gave him something he hadn't had before: the ability to work without anxiety about losing footage. "I didn't realise how much of my creative energy was going into managing risk," he said. "Now I just edit."
Key Takeaway
A laptop — even a good one — makes compromises that a dedicated workstation does not have to make. Thermal throttling, shared memory pools, storage constraints, and port limitations all compound over the course of a long-form project. For a filmmaker working on feature-length material, those compromises are measured in hours per week. A custom workstation is not a luxury for someone doing Chidi's level of work. It is the minimum viable infrastructure for doing that work well.
If you are editing feature-length or long-form content on a laptop, you are not working — you are managing constraints. Those are different activities.
Are you a filmmaker or video editor ready to stop managing constraints? See the Creator Series or talk to our team about a build designed for your workflow.