How To Edit 8K Video - Threadripper + Ultrawide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,996 words · ~9 min read
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8k red code raw footage
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How do you work with files that are multiple hundreds of megabytes per second of recording with a complex and
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Proprietary compression algorithm that allows them to retain effectively
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Nearly the full raw quality of the footage while taking up a fraction of the space
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well
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LG's monitor team seems to have an interest in this and the many technological challenges faced by creative professionals because they sponsor
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This video featuring their 49 WL 95 C
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Ultra wide monitor where I'll be figuring out just that
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So in the old days when anywhere from 4k to 6k was cutting-edge the solution was this
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$7,000 red rocket X card
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But in spite of it using either a custom ASIC or an FPGA so both highly specialized hardware
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even
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These puppies were easily overwhelmed by the epic W and the red weapon featuring reds 8k
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Helium sensor. So now this is
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basically an expensive paperweight
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ha
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That's it
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That's the joys of cutting-edge technology, right?
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Fortunately NVIDIA has been running around doing demos with their RTX series graphics cards showing GPU
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accelerated real-time full quality
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8k playback so then is this the new way now
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$1,300 is still a lot of money, but it's a lot less than
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$7,000 could this be progress?
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It's only one way to find out
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So my first encounter with this monster was back at CES and while 49 inch ultra wides like this one
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So 32 by 9 aspect ratio look at this thing have existed before
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What makes this one special is that the pixel density
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Since it's effectively
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5k by 1440 is much higher than the ones that have existed before making it actually suitable for creative work
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So it has become apparent that I'm going to need to clear some space
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So it has become apparent that I'm going to need to clear even more space
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Wow, that's a lot of timeline even with
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with my task manager open here.
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Okay, so first order of business
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is to fire up a plausible project.
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So this is an episode of Fast as Possible
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and use the normal workstations that we have downstairs.
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So my CPU is a little better.
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This is a 7980XE 18 core processor,
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and this is a GTX Titan X Pascal.
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So first things first,
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we've got ourselves at one quarter resolution.
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You can see scrubbing around in the timeline,
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nice and responsive.
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Playback, basically instantaneous,
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but whenever I'm not paused,
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you can see it's quite fuzzy,
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not representative of the finished product.
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So let's crank it up to full.
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So this is 8K and this is working just fine.
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No problem whatsoever.
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And in fact, while I'm playing it back,
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we're sitting at a mere 10 to about 30% CPU usage
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and our GPU is sitting tight at 25 to 30%.
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So at first,
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I was kind of confused by all of this.
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It's been a while since I've looked into 8K performance
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on the timeline.
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And I was thinking, well, hold on a second.
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Is there nothing special about these RTX cards
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that makes them suitable for this?
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Why does NVIDIA keep talking about this?
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And then I remembered something.
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We shoot most of our projects
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at a much higher compression ratio
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than what they would use while shooting
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a VFX heavy Hollywood production,
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for example.
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So our data rates are much lower.
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So let's go get some seven to one footage.
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So let's start with a sample from RED here.
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This is a seven to one compression ratio,
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8K clip that was recorded at 24 frames per second.
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So let's go ahead and fire this bad boy up,
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hit that playback button and ouch.
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We are looking at spikes of up to 90.
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95% on our GPU and CPU usage that is pinned at 100%
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while trying to play back that clip.
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That is a stark contrast to the,
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I think we used 20 to one, is that right, David?
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To the 20 to one footage that we capture.
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And that's not even the worst of it.
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Here's some 8K seven to one footage
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at 30 FPS that we captured.
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Let's go ahead and drag that onto the timeline.
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Yeah, woof.
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Not quite.
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Yeah, he moves like that.
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Sure, why not?
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So what's weird though,
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is that even with the heaviest footage
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that we could throw at our workstation,
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our GPU is actually neither sitting idle
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nor completely maxed out.
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So it's being used to handle the debayering process,
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which reconstructs the full color image that we see here
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from the samples that are collected by the image sensor.
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But our CPU is still in charge of the,
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entropy decoding,
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which is a process that allows the most common input signals
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to be substituted for much shorter ones,
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saving space and wavelet decoding,
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which frankly, I'm not familiar enough with
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to offer even a basic explanation
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and the Wikipedia article wasn't much help.
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Anyway though, so maybe our problem here
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is we just need more CPU horsepower to keep our GPU fed.
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AMD to the rescue then?
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Why don't we try going, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
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Why don't we try going from 18 to 32 processor cores?
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Building in progress.
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Mission failed.
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Okay, it worked.
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Didn't do anything.
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And interestingly, our GPU usage is higher, near 100%.
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So this is kind of fascinating.
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I've said it many times before
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that every system is effectively bottlenecked
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because there's something that is slowing down the process
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or else it would be infinitely fast.
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But this is like double bottlenecked.
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It's like they're perfectly matched to each other,
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but still not enough for the task.
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This is great too.
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Look what happens to timeline scrolling
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when my CPU's at 100% usage.
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So while I was troubleshooting to prepare for this video,
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I actually spent some of my time with the RTX 2080
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rather than the RTX 2080 Ti,
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because what I thought,
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was that this functionality had something to do
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with their new NVENC engine.
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But actually it doesn't.
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In fact, there's nothing about the tensor cores
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or the ray tracing cores or anything like that
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that makes the RTX card so good at this.
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It's just the sheer frigging processing power
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of all those CUDA cores.
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So we are gonna jump for 8K, seven to one footage,
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straight to the RTX 2080 Ti.
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And you might think to yourself,
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well, gee Linus, that's a 1200 to 1300 US dollar graphics card.
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Of course it can handle it,
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but that's not necessarily to be taken for granted.
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I mean, we installed CPUs that cost up to $2,000
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and they couldn't do it.
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It's all about having the right tool for the job.
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Okay, everything's working normally.
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Here we go.
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This is the moment.
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I mean, now that has kinda gotten its act together,
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that's a lot better.
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We are now at 100% CPU, 95% GPU,
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but we are still dropping frames.
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So that's it then.
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No CPU on earth can handle this 30 frames per second,
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8K, seven to one,
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Red code raw footage at least not as long as it has to handle the entropy decoding and wavelet decoding
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What if we could offload those to the GPU we are going to need a beta version of Red's decoder
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That unfortunately isn't supported by Adobe Premiere at this time
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Fortunately, it's built into the beta of Red Cine X Pro and we're gonna start with the 24 FPS footage now
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It's a little flaky right now. I'm actually not sure if this is going to work, but let's go ahead and give it a shot
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so we're gonna enable
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GPU decode and
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It's flaking out on me. So it's running it like eight frames per second
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Fortunately the fix right now seems to be to just toggle between image pipelines and there it is
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Smooth 8k playback that hitch by the way is the clip
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Restarting but that's not even the most
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Impressive part. So our CPU is sitting at just 10%
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Utilization and our GPU is up at 77 80 percent utilization. So we
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Potentially have some headroom to spare
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So our overall usage for the system is way down like 10% of our 32 cores
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We could be doing this on a more human workstation
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You know one with six or eight cores by offloading this
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We could be doing this work to the GPU because the thing to remember as well
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Is that when we were pinning both our CPU and GPU at a hundred percent?
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That was just playback. We weren't even applying any real-time effects like
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Denoising the footage or or anything like that. We were at the limit now. We have headroom to play with
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Let's go ahead and try our 30 FPS footage though
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That's actually working a little bit better than I expected when I the first time around
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I actually had to overclock the GPU a little bit to get this quite so smooth, but you know what I'm taking it
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So there it is our GPU CUDA usage jumps up near
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90%
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But our CPU stays at 10% and we are smoothly playing back
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7 to 1
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8k red footage at 29.97 frames per second
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Can we get some applause sound effect?
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In the video or something? I don't know. This is crazy
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So all that's left now then is to thank LG for sponsoring this video featuring their 49 WL 95 CW
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Ultra wide monitor
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I mean
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I think it's pretty obvious why they wanted us to feature this in this video because it's designed for content creators like photographers
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Filmmakers music producers and more who can really benefit from this
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Kind of a canvas being able to work on more than one thing
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simultaneously or just be able to manage and see
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extremely long timelines without zooming out giving them a finer degree of control and it's not even just for creators
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But office work would also be a great option someone like a programmer
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Stock trader or really anyone who needs a ton of side-by-side screen real estate because it's basically
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Exactly the same as having two
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2560 by 1440 monitors side by side
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Except that you have no bezel in between LG's also been hard at work on software that allows you to take two inputs
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So like your desktop and your laptop and seamlessly share your mouse and keyboard between them just like moving between them
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So you can control two systems at once. It's got full support for USB type-c including power delivery
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So you can use it as a single cable docking solution for your laptop
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And it's got support for HDR 10 with two 10 watt speakers built-in. In fact, it was didn't realize they were gonna be that loud
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That happened that happened a couple times during the video
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So check it out at the link in the video description, and I guess that's pretty much it
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Thanks for watching you guys if you disliked this video
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