Best 4K video editing laptop
- Thread starter Thoriceland
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Yes, proxies will lessen the load when EDITING but unless you want crappy output you want to use full files to do the final render and it's this phase that sticks the CPU at 100% for the longest. There will be a day when a laptop can be used without fear for 4K video editing but that day isn't here yet unless you have an external cooling system to improve cooling of the laptop. I can not imagine trying to render a 30 minute 4K video that might stick the CPU at 100% for 90 minutes straight.
Brian
Using proxy files to edit 4K implies the full res 4K original files are implement for rendering, of course. And yes, if you don't have a graphics accelerator, it can take a while to render 4K.
I think the day is here for gaming laptops to easily do 4K editing, complete with graphic accelerator. This recent article can help with that selection, taken from post #4. At around $1600 to $1900, these are good value for editing 4K, not to mention you can edit while on the road now, which was near impossible a couple years ago.
FYI, 30min drone videos are too long, 4K or not. Drone videos should be edited to no more than 5min of the "best stuff", IMHO.
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John, you disappoint me, that article says diddly about 4K video editing -- it's pretty much about gaming. In addition, the specs listed are anything but impressive and my desktop would easily smoke any of them. Also, what a load of nonsense that creators should be limited to 5 minute videos -- I have many videos over 20 minutes and some over an hour and I'm not alone. There is a sub genre of videos about trains and its not uncommon to have a camera set up at a single location or a few limited locations and have 30 minutes or more of just trains going by with tens of thousands of viewers. You or I may not think a 30 minute video of trains going by is all that interesting but lots of people do -- you don't get to speak for them!
Let me repeat ... a current generation laptop, even the best there is, isn't up for long rendering periods of 100% CPU operation and pretending it is and claiming that here will only make those the believe you more likely to try and then fry there $1000+ laptop. At this stage to do 4K rendering of anything more than a few minutes of video is best done with a desktop PC. A typical 4K video will require at least 2 minutes to render a minute of video and with transitions and effect that could easily go to 3:1 on a high performance desktop -- on a high end laptop that could go well beyond 4:1 or more. So, even a 5 minute video could lock you laptop CPU at 100% for 20 minutes or more!
Brian
You're right, I do think trains going by would be boring for 30min, and I like trains, but that's me. Notice the last 4 letters in my post.....IMHO. You don't have to get all bent out of shape about my opinion. However, I think most will agree with me they don't have time to watch 30min videos.
Again, that's my opinion. Do what you like with your videos, I'm OK with it, but I'm not watching for 30min, I hope you're not offended.As for the laptops, sure you can get a higher performance graphics accelerator in a desktop, no doubt, and you may very well have a whiz bang system, granted. 2 to 1 rendering of 4K is very good, sounds like a nice setup. But laptops with graphics acceleration, such as in gaming systems, are well capable of editing 4K video. Have you tried one of the new 8th gen systems with hardware graphic acceleration? Hardware acceleration is what makes it possible, instead of the general purpose i7 doing it in software. The hardware in a graphic card accelerator is for encoding (and decoding) of M.264 and 265, which makes things way faster, not only for gaming, but for editing video, like your desktop. Will it perform like your desktop, NO, that's unlikely, but it can do the job with a little more time, maybe 30 or 40% more (please don't hammer me on my estimate until you test it and gather facts). My point is the cost and size convenience is viable now for laptops, but if you insist it's not, OK, that's your opinion. Others in this forum are using gaming laptops to edit 4K fine, some claim without using a proxy, which amazes me. Maybe some will chime in on this.
You're right, I do think trains going by would be boring for 30min, and I like trains, but that's me. Notice the last 4 letters in my post.....IMHO. You don't have to get all bent out of shape about my opinion. However, I think most will agree with me they don't have time to watch 30min videos.
As for the laptops, sure you can get a higher performance graphics accelerator in a desktop, no doubt, and you may very well have a whiz bang system, granted. 2 to 1 rendering of 4K is very good, sounds like a nice setup. But laptops with graphics acceleration, such as in gaming systems, are well capable of editing 4K video. Have you tried one of the new 8th gen systems with hardware graphic acceleration? Hardware acceleration is what makes it possible, instead of the general purpose i7 doing it in software. The hardware in a graphic card accelerator is for encoding (and decoding) of M.264 and 265, which makes things way faster, not only for gaming, but for editing video, like your desktop. Will it perform like your desktop, NO, that's unlikely, but it can do the job with a little more time, maybe 30 or 40% more (please don't hammer me on my estimate until you test it and gather facts). My point is the cost and size convenience is viable now for laptops, but if you insist it's not, OK, that's your opinion. Others in this forum are using gaming laptops to edit 4K fine, some claim without using a proxy, which amazes me. Maybe some will chime in on this.
For the most part rendering video is a CPU task with a little input from the GPU. There are differences between NLE's but with PP the GPU is no where near as important as the CPU. Having more cores is an advantage and mobile systems tend to have fewer cores than desktop CPU's.
I have a high end 4K laptop and have edited and rendered video using it but I quickly learned the rendering time for even short videos was pegging the CPU at 100% for a long time. I have little doubt that there are folks that do edit and render 4K video using a laptop as I'm certain there are folks that try to drive an RV air conditioner with a 2KW generator -- I wouldn't recommend it!
Hey, if 5 minute 4K videos are more than you plan to do and your laptop can tolerate 20 solid minutes of 100% CPU by all means have at it -- it's you laptop and your money. OTH, if you make any 4K videos lasting longer than that and don't want to risk frying your $1000+ laptop it would probably be wise to consider a desktop for that task. If you make only a handful of videos and they are all short then a laptop is probably OK, but if you are more active with video production and/or your videos are longer the risk of smoking your laptop is more than I'd take. But, you pays your money, you takes your choice!
Brian
Intel CPUs will slow down the clock rate if they overheat, there's no danger in "Frying" something. Heat sensors are built in the CPU and protect themselves, so do the GPUs. Worse case of overheating is the render job slows down, anyway that's what should happen if built right. As for suggesting the GPU isn't useful for video editing, I disagree, so does Adobe. Both CPU and GPU have an almost equal role for rendering, but the GPU helps the most during the edit preview steps, which to me is more important than render time, when I can walk away and let it churn away, or get other easy work done on the same computer. I would however buy at least a 4 core i7 as a baseline, such as the i7-7820HK in the Razorblade laptop in the article. I think that laptop would suffice for most 4K casual users that need something portable for 4K edits during travel. I'm not suggesting using it for "production work", since most of us here are small time video creators that make short videos for YouTube or small business clients.
Yes, Intel CPU's will slow down when they overheat and that should help mitigate the frying issue somewhat, but the problem is the design goal for a laptop is more about making things light and thin and not so much about keeping things cool. Also, you over state the importance of a GPU. In my desktop PC, which I built in 2016, I have an i7-5820K CPU with 6-cores that's over clocked a bit and has water cooling. I also have an nVidia 980 TI GPU which is also a little over clocked and water cooled. Add to that 32GB of fast DDR4 RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD for scratch and all said I have a pretty high end system. One of the features I have with the Corsair CPU cooler is monitoring software called Corsair Link that allows me to watch temps, fan speeds etc. When rendering my GPU almost never gets above 32C even after prolonged periods of rendering with transitions and effects, but when running a gaming benchmark the temp will rise quickly to over 50C. In summary, the GPU is hardly working at all whereas my CPU is locked at 100% or nearly so and temps, even with water cooling, exceed 40C.
So, perhaps with the better laptops the risk for burning up are less, but how does one know for sure there laptop is so well designed? Again, the goal in most cases is lightness and thinness.
Looking forward and that includes some of the very new CPU's and GPU's that can natively handle H.265 we should see fewer issues with 4K video editing and rendering, but for now things are still iffy for 4K on a laptop.
Brian
I agree the GPU isn't working as hard during rendering as with gaming, however, take away that GPU and see that happens to your render time. You'll be crying the blues I bet. The GPU does a lot of work for the CPU, it helps a lot, but you don't need a super fast GPU to help the CPU do it's job. A mid range GPU is adequate if portable editing is your goal, kinda like the Razor laptop offers with the GTX1080 GPU architecture. Those laptops aren't cheap though, and they aren't light with that 17" 4K screen.
Laptops that can handle raw 4k.
In my opinion, you need minimum i7 7700 or better ~ 3.0 + ghz (can unclock to 4.8ghz), gtx 1070 8gb or better (even though still expensive, arguably best bang for buck gpu) 1 TB SSD, 32gb ram (prefer ddr5 for faster speeds), and an additional cooling pad for long renders as the i7's do like to get hot.
This machine will laugh at raw 4k video, even with transitions, effects, color coding, and even warp stabilizers.
In my opinion, you need minimum i7 7700 or better ~ 3.0 + ghz (can unclock to 4.8ghz), gtx 1070 8gb or better (even though still expensive, arguably best bang for buck gpu) 1 TB SSD, 32gb ram (prefer ddr5 for faster speeds), and an additional cooling pad for long renders as the i7's do like to get hot.
This machine will laugh at raw 4k video, even with transitions, effects, color coding, and even warp stabilizers.
I doubt that will work very good, if at all with 4k. Why not try it before you leave?
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Yup. I will try it for sure. Took couple of 4k video taken with the ipad. It works but then again they were just short clips. This is b4 I got delivery of my p4po. Thanks.
Or you can use DaVinci Resolve which is free for a single user license. It allows for editing and grading in HD with proxies and then the timeline can be non destructively changed to 4K resolution and rendered.
The GPU is as important as the CPU for image processing. Pro level workstations will have multiple GPU's to maximize throughput with one GPU for the user interface and the other(s) for processing the data. Minimum VRAM on the GPU is 2GB for good performance. At least with DaVinci Resolve the software is coded for 32-bit floating point operations so a FP64 workstation class GPU is not going to improve performance.
Not all i7 processors are created equal. The mobile versions found on laptops have 4 cores whereas the bare minimum recommended by the makes of video processing software is an 8 core CPU.
I use a laptop or netbook when traveling but at home I use a tower workstation with dual Xeon processors and dual GPU's.
The GPU is as important as the CPU for image processing. Pro level workstations will have multiple GPU's to maximize throughput with one GPU for the user interface and the other(s) for processing the data. Minimum VRAM on the GPU is 2GB for good performance. At least with DaVinci Resolve the software is coded for 32-bit floating point operations so a FP64 workstation class GPU is not going to improve performance.
Not all i7 processors are created equal. The mobile versions found on laptops have 4 cores whereas the bare minimum recommended by the makes of video processing software is an 8 core CPU.
I use a laptop or netbook when traveling but at home I use a tower workstation with dual Xeon processors and dual GPU's.
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