What specs for 4K editing.

[Steve Struthers]

I'm considering buying a 4K-capable camera and have also been wondering what kind of hardware I need to edit 4K video. I'm currently running a home-built PC I put together about four or five years ago.

Not sure yet whether I'm going to get a dedicated 4K video camera or possibly a bridge camera like the Sony RX10III or the Panasonic FZ2500.

The CPU is an i7 2600 quad-core running at 3.40GHz, with 8GB of 1333 MHz RAM, with Windows 10 Pro loaded on a Kingston 128GB SSD I bought last year. Video is supported by a nVidia GTX750 video card.

I recently upgraded to Magix Vegas Platinum Movie Studio 13.

Earlier today, I downloaded some raw 4K clips to see if my computer could handle the footage and render it properly. What I noticed was that the preview in Movie Studio 13 was slow and juddery at the 'Best' quality setting. Much of the slowness disappeared if I changed the preview setting to 'Draft'.

One of the clips I downloaded was a 13-second 4K AVCHD clip, and the other was a 1.5GB 4K clip running around 10 minutes in .MOV format. I put both of these clips on the timeline, cut away some of the footage, and inserted a cross-fade between the .MOV and AVCHD clips. Vegas Movie Studio took a long time to ingest the larger clip and build proxy files.

Rendering was OK and didn't take too long, but the resulting render was glitchy on playback regardless of whether I used VLC or Windows Media. Reducing the bit rate from 26Mb/s to 15Mb/s made the second render only slightly less glitchy. I deliberately chose the higher bit rates as a sort of stress test.

Removing the short AVCHD clip from the timeline and rendering just the cut-down portion of the MOV clip without changing the bit rate resulted in a glitch-free render.

Given the slow ingest, the slow/juddery playback in preview and the problems I had rendering the files, I'm thinking I may need to increase the RAM to at least 16GB and consider buying a more advanced video card.

I don't really need 4K, virtually all of my stuff is exported to Youtube anyway, but 4K video looks really nice when downsampled to 1080p FHD.

[Mark Williams]

Larry, I also upload 4k clips to Pond5 from my GH4. I use MpegStreamclip to trim the ends and delete the audio. Simply mark the in and out points, delete the audio track, hit trim and "save as" which will not re-encode the whole clip. Here is a link and it is free Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows

I recently upgraded my system from my 9 year old computer:

Edius 5.51 editing software, Asus P6T mobo, i7-920 cpu, Corsair 650 watt p.s., RAM 3GB, Sapphire HD7700 video card, Noctua cooler, MX100 SSD system drive, 1TB WD Black drive, Vista 32 bit, HDSPARK preview card to Samsung LN19A330 HDTV

To this:

Edius 8 WG editing software, i7 6700K cpu, Asus 170-A mobo, 16 GB Ram, EVGA 550 watt power supply, System drive 960 Evo M.2, Video drive 850 Evo SSD, Shadow Rock Slim cooler, Evga GTX1050 TI SC video card, Windows 10, (to be added latter 4k monitor and Blackmagic 4k mini-monitor output card).

[Rob Cantwell]

Prior to moving up to 4K i upgraded as follows;
Had a Dell XPS 87003.40 gigahertz Intel Core i7-4770

i upgraded the memory up to 24Gb

Replaced the original 2.5 TB Western Digital HD with a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1 TB as the boot drive, I use this drive to load and edit projects before storing them on the other drives on the computer, I have a second 1.5 TB Seagate Drive for short term archiving and two external drives totalling 6 TB for backups.

Replaced the GeForce GT 720 with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card.

Upgraded the PSU as well.

The main things to upgrade that will allow a better 4k experience is RAM, Fast HD and Graphics Card.
Thinking of getting a dedicated SSD for editing.

[Larry Johnson]

Originally Posted by Mark Williams

Larry, I also upload 4k clips to Pond5 from my GH4. I use MpegStreamclip to trim the ends and delete the audio. Simply mark the in and out points, delete the audio track, hit trim and "save as" which will not re-encode the whole clip. Here is a link and it is free Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows

I recently upgraded my system from my 9 year old computer:

Edius 5.51 editing software, Asus P6T mobo, i7-920 cpu, Corsair 650 watt p.s., RAM 3GB, Sapphire HD7700 video card, Noctua cooler, MX100 SSD system drive, 1TB WD Black drive, Vista 32 bit, HDSPARK preview card to Samsung LN19A330 HDTV

To this:

Edius 8 WG editing software, i7 6700K cpu, Asus 170-A mobo, 16 GB Ram, EVGA 550 watt power supply, System drive 960 Evo M.2, Video drive 850 Evo SSD, Shadow Rock Slim cooler, Evga GTX1050 TI SC video card, Windows 10, (to be added latter 4k monitor and Blackmagic 4k mini-monitor output card).

Thanks Mark. For now, I'm getting by with my macbook pro, late 2008 version. I'm using iMovie to trim and remove audio. I've uploaded about 125 in the last month. Even though they don't play well on my computer, once it's uploaded to Pond5, it plays well. During editting I just move the cursor slow to figure out where to trim. It takes longer to upload to pond5 than to edit.

[Mark Williams]

Larry,

Is iMovie re-encoding your clips? I don't think Mpegstreamclip does so it is original footage. There is a mac version.

[Roger Keay]

Originally Posted by Steve Struthers

I'm considering buying a 4K-capable camera and have also been wondering what kind of hardware I need to edit 4K video. I'm currently running a home-built PC I put together about four or five years ago.

I have a similar situation myself but I have already made the decision to build a new system. I have used Adobe PP in the past but recently started playing with BMD Resolve. The thing I like about Resolve is the resolution independent timeline. You can edit using whatever resolution you like on the timeline without limiting the output resolution. You can pick your clips and the program decides which ones to optimize for editing purposes. I have taken 1080p60 clips and used a 720p60 timeline for the edit. I generated outputs at 720p60, 1080p60 and even 2160p60.

I spent some time watching the Windows task manager performance display as I played the timeline. The critical issue seems to be the data rate available for access to the cache files when using high quality, low compression formats as the optimized media. Low compression translates into bigger files and higher data rates. Higher compression reduces the demand on the storage system but eats up the CPU and GPU leaving less capacity for real time effects and color correction. The motherboard of the new system is an Asus Prime Z270-A which has two slots for on-board SSD (M.2 x4NVMe). The drive I selected is 1700 MB/second read and 600 MB/second write which should easily provide enough data access speed for real time editing at 720p60 or 1080p60. It may also be sufficient for real time 2160p60 but the CPU and GPU may limit performance.

For what it's worth, I was having trouble getting the old system working well with 720p60. I eventually tried a disk speed test on the RAID drive and discovered it was operating poorly and unable to deliver the 120 MB/second that it should have been able to achieve. The speed varied and dropped during repeated tests so I can only assume the old drives are failing. The drive has plenty of available capacity and isn't fragmented.

Just my 2 cents ...

[Jack Zhang]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

Magix vegas pro has proress output capability on a windows pc.

Yes, but not "Apple" ProRes. It's a different implementation that will not pass QC tests of major broadcasters.

You either need to buy a decent Mac or build a Hackintosh.

[Steven Davis]

Originally Posted by Larry Johnson

OK, I'll play along provided someone address my initial question afterwards.

I ran the Activity Monitor (a first for me) while playing a very short 4K video, as you suggested. The VTdecoderXPCservice rose and spiked above 100% during the playback. What does that mean.
And how do we know that it's not my video card, which I understand can't be switched out. Specs of my computer are shown below, but I've upgraded to 8GB memory.

I'm having the same issues. I have a iMacPro and with multicam playback, it's choppy like crazy. FCPX goes to like 300% CPU usage, and the VTdecoderXPCservice is cranking on my CPU as well.

I'm currently as of this week, on my second level with Apple, the FCPX guys don't understand why I'm having such poor performance.

[Steven Davis]

So digging more, I found an article that alleged Chrome was the culprit for VTdecoderXPCservice cranking and sending the CPU into a terrible spin. So to test, I uninstalled Chrome and the VTdecoderXPCservice did not go crazy.

Now what. I need Chrome for web design. Hmmm.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Wow this thread is 3 years old! Reading through it, saw I was rebuked from Larry for not getting it. Lol.

Yeah that weird Chrome would cause a problem. I just finished a project still using my 2009 mac, the client loaned me his 2019 imac so I would edit 4k multi clips. Wow did it breath through it. On my old computer in a pinch I can edit a couple of 4k tracks in multiclip if I create an optimize prores file It works pretty well but the render can take up loads of space.

[Steven Davis]

Yeah, I found this article on a google search.

But here is the blog post that referenced Chrome.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19...eeze-and-crash

That article is from 2019.

[Doug Jensen]

Originally Posted by Pete Cofrancesco

Wow this thread is 3 years old! Reading through it, saw I was rebuked from Larry for not getting it. Lol.

Yeah that weird Chrome would cause a problem. I just finished a project still using my 2009 mac, the client loaned me his 2019 imac so I would edit 4k multi clips. Wow did it breath through it. On my old computer in a pinch I can edit a couple of 4k tracks in multiclip if I create an optimize prores file It works pretty well but the render can take up loads of space.

People always talk about one computer vs, another, etc., but in my experience it is really one's external hard drive setup that makes the biggest difference in NLE playback performance. But hardly anyone ever mentions their drives or seems to care about that huge factor in performance.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

People always talk about one computer vs, another, etc., but in my experience it is really one's external hard drive setup that makes the biggest difference in NLE playback performance. But hardly anyone ever mentions their drives or seems to care about that huge factor in performance.

Everyone's setup is so different. For example I edit only on one desktop computer at home. So it's always a given I'd edit off at best an internal ssd and at worst an internal spinner. However when you get into working between laptops and different workstations at multiple locations, it makes sense to work off an external drive that you simply take with you and use with multiple computers.

But in my experience that graphics card plays a larger role for playblack than hard drive speed, since the majority of processing power is being directed to the gpu to decode the codec for real time playback. Adding 4k, multi streams, and effects all make in harder to playback smoothly. That's why transcoding to Pro Res is a big help.

[Doug Jensen]

Pete, my experience does not match yours so we'll have to agree to disagree. My advice to anyone experiencing poor playback remains to take a good look at their drives and how they are connected before spending a penny on other hardware.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

Pete, my experience does not match yours so we'll have to agree to disagree. My advice to anyone experiencing poor playback remains to take a good look at their drives and how they are connected before spending a penny on other hardware.

I don't doubt it. I've had problems with externals in the past and have chosen to eliminate the issue by working on internal drives.

I've noticed that often you can under estimate where the bottleneck is and how it effects your performance. For example, I have a ssd and slow spinner drive. I didn't understand why there wasn't a big speed difference. What I found out was since I have an older computer that has sata2 that limited the speed to 200mbs, which virtually took away most of the speed advantage of the ssd. Likewise, I've read that most motherboards use one controller for all external ports. Meaning connect more than one device you could be cutting the bandwidth in half. In addition they always list a high bandwidth number for ports, but this is often a peak number that doesn't last very long and random reads and writes can be much slower than copying one file. So lots of factors and bottlenecks to consider.