Gadgetory

so this video got its inspiration from a demo that I saw at the Intel booth at PAX they were editing 4k video footage from a Panasonic gh4 camera with truly astonishing performance on an eight-core extreme edition processor with quad channel ddr4 memory etc so setup that's not attainable to those people and the demo would have been really impressive to me not good well the power of the eight core if I hadn't recently with a lot of help from Ed's all who also did the science behind this video discovered that by transcoding 4k video to GoPros Sinha form video codec thanks to its GPU acceleration we could get that same performance that we saw in the demo with no significant loss in quality on our video editing desktops here at the office mirror 6-core extreme editions you can watch the whole video about all of that here but then I was thinking to myself this isn't some wimpy tech channel list as why is Turk turns so we decided to amp it up a notch we approached Asus to sponsor a deeper investigation and answer this question once and for all although admittedly it's one no one has ever asked me can you edit 4k video on an ultra portable laptop let's find out okay so let's start with a look at the machine that we had us to send us for science the Zenbook ux302 you there were a couple of key things we were looking for one while not necessarily an ultrabook by Intel's definition it had to be ultra portable it wouldn't even press anyone if we pulled a full fledged gaming laptop or portable workstation like a g7 51 out of a backpack and started editing video on it number two we needed a discrete GPU that is to say a standalone one not quiet and hard to notice one Intel's onboard graphics have made great strides but a dedicated graphics card in this case one with CUDA support is going to do more for most GPU accelerated workloads than onboard can and we need as much power as we can get if we're going to have any hope of editing 4k and finally 3 we needed enough CPU horsepower and memory to support video editing at all so we went for a config with an Intel skylake core i7 6500 you with 12 gigs of RAM but is that even enough well we started with a base line by taking 4k footage right off our sony FS 5 dumping it into a time line and trying to edit it abominable I mean CPU usage was pegged at a hundred percent right away to the point where we were measuring performance in seconds per frame not frames per second a 7s2 footage didn't fare much better with better CPU usage but up to a four second delay when moving the playhead to a new spot on the timeline yuck but that's what we expected so we had a desktop machine transcode 4k footage to Sidda form 4k using Adobe Media encoder and copied it over the network to the local disc on the notebook and whoa friends CPU and GPU usage at full 4k resolution in the preview window was sitting at 70 and 90% or more respectively with choppy but at least consistent playback not bad dialing the preview window down to half resolution yields sniffing reduction in CPU and GPU use with one-quarter resolution running it anywhere from 27 to 30 FPS with responsive timeline scrubbing and 1/8 able to run at 30fps solid now it should be noted that framerate dips were observed across all preview resolutions when additional layers were added so the experience is not absolutely perfect but when I popped the big question to Ed could you let it 4k comfortably on this setup the answer was yeah but hold the phone - you're ignoring one of the biggest bottlenecks in the video editing process the export of the finished file actually I'm not ignoring it at all so there's a couple of different ways you can tackle it with a watch folder configuration on your desktop you can finish the file export it in cinah form drop it in there and have that desktop deal with it but what we also discovered is that that didn't actually end up much faster if at all than just exporting in h.264 anyway thanks again to GPU acceleration so you can see I'm actually running an export right now this is a two-minute file that's going to finish in about 17 to 20 minutes and with GPU usage pegged at 100% it is using the GPU whoo but copying all the project files to a portable device to work on them and then copying them back or whatever isn't going to appear in an advertising brochure for a thin enlight anytime soon with wireless connectivity everywhere and the cloud people are getting used to the idea of just working off of network data and not having to store anything locally on their machines and while you won't be editing 4k video over the internet anytime soon I wanted to investigate further to see if we could at least edit directly off of the drive of the more powerful machine or a storage machine somewhere else using a home wireless router so step one was to enable maximum performance in the power profiles of the machine and step two was to plug in a wired network USB adapter so I used the 100 mega one that was in the box and the experience was subpar we're talking five frames per second regardless of the playback resolution running off the low speed Wi-Fi in our office yeah that was a similar story but our xi3 access points are not designed for blistering speed therefore range and consistency so we did make some useful observations here though we've got low CPU usage on our 4k footage and higher CPU usage on the 1080p footage that was mixed into our timeline indicating ample processing power and a bottleneck somewhere else because this is one of the challenges of cinah form the file sizes are actually larger than the footage directly off the camera in many cases so we were easily exceeding our connection speed with a 100 megabit wired connection and our office Wi-Fi so I grabbed a third-party gigabit USB to Ethernet adapter and boom timeline performance got responsive and we were back up to performance that was pretty much indistinguishable from editing locally progress but that still involves a wire that's not really the point could we do it with Wi-Fi so I dusted off a wireless AC 1300 megabit access point these typically run around 150 to 200 bucks for a good one like the tp-link google onhub one that we checked out recently and took another crack at it there we go boo freaking yeah 300 mega bit through put while scrubbing footage about the same is on our wired connection and again pretty much indistinguishable performance on Wi-Fi compared to editing locally and while there are some caveats you're not going to be able to get this kind of performance if you're 200 feet away from your access point what we have managed to do here is validate that it's possible to edit 4k video on a thin and light at your dining room table with a mere dual-core core i7 if you pick the right configuration namely one with strong Wi-Fi we tried the same experiment on the surface book and it was not nearly as successful and a dedicated GPU that parts important because even at one-quarter resolution in our preview window GPU usage on our 940m was sitting at 30 to 40 percent and we were pegging it when we were exporting finished files speaking of graphics cards and video things what about graphics and other cool video things like video blocks video blocks provides affordable premium stock video and they've been doing it since 2011 they operate on a subscription-based unlimited library and they add new footage to the library twice per month they've got over and brace ourselves here 10 million dollars worth of footage After Effects templates and motion backgrounds and everything in video blocks is unlimited library is 100% royalty-free and yours to use for personal and commercial projects they recently launched a new Members Only video marketplace as an added benefit for subscribers and they've got clips from contributors around the world that are only available to videoblocks subscribers so contributors on that marketplace by the way keep 100% of the sales as commissioned 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