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 8 Core
Extreme Edition processor with quad Channel ddr4 memory Etc so a setup
that's not attainable to most people and
the demo would have been really impressive to me and i' have gone wow
the power of the8 core if I hadn't recently with a lot of help from edzel
who also did the science behind this video discovered that by transcoding 4K
video to gopro's copor video Codec
thanks to its GPU acceleration we could get that same performance that we saw in
the demo with no significant loss and quality on our video editing desktops
here at the office mere six 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
Channel this is minus
t 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 as Su send us for
science the Zenbook ux303u there were a couple of key things
we were looking for one while not necessarily an Ultra Book by Intel's
definition it had to be ultra portable it wouldn't impress anyone if we pulled
a full-fledged gaming laptop or portable workstation like a g751 out of a
backpack and started editing video on it number two we needed a discret 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 three 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 U with 12 gigs of RAM but
is that even enough well we started with
a baseline by taking 4K footage right off our Sony fs5 dumping it into a
timeline and trying to edit it
abominable I mean CPU usage was pegged
at 100% right away to the point where we were measuring performance in seconds
per frame not frames per second a7s2
footage didn't Fair much better with better CPU usage but up to a 4 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 cfor 4K
using Adobe Media encoder and copied it over the network to the local dis on the
notebook and whoa friends CPU and GPU
use 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 a significant reduction in CPU
and GPU use with one quarter resolution running it anywhere from 27 to 30 FPS
with responsive timeline scrubbing and 1/ 18 able to run at 30 FPS solid now
now it should be noted that frame rate 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 edit 4K
comfortably on this setup the answer was
yeah but hold the phone lonus 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 cfor 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 an h264 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 wo 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 and light 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 uh 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 megabit 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 lowspeed Wi-Fi in our office yeah that was a similar story but
our xi3 access points are not designed for blistering speed they're for range
and consistency so we did make some useful observations here though we 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 copor 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 thirdparty gigabit USB to
Ethernet adapter and boom timeline
performance 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 tplink Google
onhub one that we checked out recently and took another crack at it there we go
boo freaking y 300 megabit throughput
while scrubbing footage about the same as 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 ft 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 this same
experiment on the surface book and it was not nearly as successful and a
dedicated GPU that part's important because even at one quarter resolution
in our preview window GPU usage on our 940m was sitting at 30 to 40% and we
were pegging it when we were exporting finished files
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