4K video editing on an ULTRABOOK!?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,827 words · ~9 min read
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so this video got its inspiration from a demo that I saw at the Intel booth at
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Pax they were editing 4K video footage from a Panasonic GH4 camera with truly
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astonishing performance on an 8 Core
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Extreme Edition processor with quad Channel ddr4 memory Etc so a setup
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that's not attainable to most people and
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the demo would have been really impressive to me and i' have gone wow
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the power of the8 core if I hadn't recently with a lot of help from edzel
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who also did the science behind this video discovered that by transcoding 4K
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video to gopro's copor video Codec
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thanks to its GPU acceleration we could get that same performance that we saw in
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the demo with no significant loss and quality on our video editing desktops
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here at the office mere six Core Extreme
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editions you can watch the whole video about all of that here but then I was
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thinking to myself this isn't some wimpy
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Channel this is minus
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t so we decided to amp it up a notch we
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approached ASUS to sponsor a deeper investigation and answer this question
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once and for all although admittedly it's one no one has ever asked me can
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you edit 4K video on an ultra portable
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laptop let's find out
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okay so let's start with a look at the machine that we had as Su send us for
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science the Zenbook ux303u there were a couple of key things
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we were looking for one while not necessarily an Ultra Book by Intel's
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definition it had to be ultra portable it wouldn't impress anyone if we pulled
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a full-fledged gaming laptop or portable workstation like a g751 out of a
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backpack and started editing video on it number two we needed a discret GPU that
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is to say a standalone one not quiet and hard to notice one Intel's onboard
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Graphics have made great strides but a dedicated graphics card in this case one
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with Cuda support is going to do more for most GPU accelerated workloads than
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onboard can and we need as much power as
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we can get if we're going to have any hope of editing 4K and finally three we
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needed enough CPU horsepower and memory
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to support video editing at all so we went for a config with an Intel Skylake
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core i7 6500 U with 12 gigs of RAM but
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is that even enough well we started with
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a baseline by taking 4K footage right off our Sony fs5 dumping it into a
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timeline and trying to edit it
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abominable I mean CPU usage was pegged
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at 100% right away to the point where we were measuring performance in seconds
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per frame not frames per second a7s2
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footage didn't Fair much better with better CPU usage but up to a 4 second
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delay when moving the playhead to a new spot on the timeline yuck but that's
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what we expected so we had a desktop machine transcode 4K footage to cfor 4K
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using Adobe Media encoder and copied it over the network to the local dis on the
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notebook and whoa friends CPU and GPU
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use at full 4K resolution in the preview
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window was sitting at 70 and 90% or more
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respectively with choppy but at least consistent playback not bad dialing the
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preview window down to half resolution yields a significant reduction in CPU
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and GPU use with one quarter resolution running it anywhere from 27 to 30 FPS
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with responsive timeline scrubbing and 1/ 18 able to run at 30 FPS solid now
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now it should be noted that frame rate dips were observed across all preview
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resolutions when additional layers were added so the experience is not
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absolutely perfect but when I popped the big question to Ed could you edit 4K
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comfortably on this setup the answer was
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yeah but hold the phone lonus you're ignoring one of the biggest bottlenecks
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in the video editing process the export of the finished file actually I'm not
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ignoring it at all so there's a couple of different ways you can tackle it with
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a watch folder configuration on your desktop you can finish the file export
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it in cfor drop it in there and have that desktop deal with it but what we
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also discovered is that that didn't actually end up much faster if at all
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than just exporting an h264 anyway thanks again to GPU acceleration so you
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can see I'm actually running an export right now this is a two-minute file
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that's going to finish in about 17 to 20
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minutes and with GPU usage pegged at 100% it is using the GPU wo but copying
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all the project files to a portable device to work on them and then copying
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them back or whatever isn't going to appear in an advertising brochure for a
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thin and light anytime soon with wireless connectivity everywhere and the
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cloud people are getting used to the idea of just working off of network data
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and not having to store anything locally on their machines and while you won't be
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editing 4K video over the internet anytime soon I wanted to investigate
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further to see if we could at least edit directly off of the drive of the more
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powerful machine or a storage machine somewhere else using a home wireless
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router so step one was to uh enable
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maximum performance in the power profiles of the machine and step two was
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to plug in a wired Network USB adapter
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so I used the 100 megabit one that was in the box and the experience was subpar
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we're talking five frames per second regardless of the playback resolution
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running off the lowspeed Wi-Fi in our office yeah that was a similar story but
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our xi3 access points are not designed for blistering speed they're for range
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and consistency so we did make some useful observations here though we got
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low CPU usage on our 4K footage and
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higher CPU usage on the 1080p footage
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that was mixed into our timeline indicating ample processing power and a
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bottleneck somewhere else because this is one of the challenges of copor the
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file sizes are actually larger than the footage directly off the camera in many
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cases so we were easily exceeding our
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connection speed with a 100 megabit wired connection and our office Wi-Fi so
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I grabbed a thirdparty gigabit USB to
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Ethernet adapter and boom timeline
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performance performance got responsive and we were back up to Performance that
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was pretty much indistinguishable from editing locally
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progress but that still involves a wire
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that's not really the point could we do it with Wi-Fi so I dusted off a wireless
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AC 1300 megabit access point these
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typically run around 150 to 200 bucks for a good one like the tplink Google
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onhub one that we checked out recently and took another crack at it there we go
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boo freaking y 300 megabit throughput
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while scrubbing footage about the same as on our wired connection and again
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pretty much indistinguishable performance on Wi-Fi compared to editing
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locally and while there are some caveats you're not going to be able to get this
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kind of performance if you're 200 ft away from your access point what we have
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managed to do here is validate that it's possible to edit 4K video on a thin and
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light at your dining room table with a mere dual core core i7 if you pick the
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right configuration namely one with strong Wi-Fi we tried this same
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experiment on the surface book and it was not nearly as successful and a
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dedicated GPU that part's important because even at one quarter resolution
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in our preview window GPU usage on our 940m was sitting at 30 to 40% and we
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were pegging it when we were exporting finished files
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