4K - is there any point?

gallois wrote:

Fuji I can give you a list of the equipment used in pro 4k and 8k edit suites in the US.You can then compare it to the speeds you can get out of the latest macbook. Nearly all the hardware bits are available through Amazon.If you wish just pm me as I am sure the whole list would be very boring to most. By the way this kit makes a great simulator during downtime.

Before I waste your time: how much all in all?

In case the camera has a Bayer pattern filter, you need more than 4K in order to have real 4K at the end. On the other hand, UHD (3840×2160) is not 4K (4096 pixels wide) but that is splitting hairs.
On the other hand, film grain and texture are now an asset, not a liability. We worked on the latest Ken Loach film shown in Cannes, shot on Super16. it is a social drama and the rougher look of the format supports the story.

film grain and texture are now an asset, not a liability

This is also worth a read, for high frame rates being undesirable in “professional” usage.

about £4K for the new top spec. Apple Mac Book Pro

It would be interesting how this compares with a top-spec desktop machine (windows or mac os) with the inevitably required top-spec video card which is the size of a brick and has three fans emitting about 110db of noise Basically a high-spec gaming PC. That will also cost you best part of 4k, but I can’t believe Apple have squeezed that into a laptop.

I don’t think the video card has a lot to do with rendering or viewing videos, video cards are about 3D performance, and videos are 2D. All the performance speedup for video tends to be stuff integrated into recent Intel and AMD CPUs to offload the compression/decompression. (Maybe there’s compression software that uses the video card as an additional processor, basically the modern video card bears architectural similarities to supercomputers of the 80s and 90s – basically, they are vector processors – as that’s basically what’s going on rendering 3D video for a game – but that seems a bit pointless since most CPUs have video encoding hardware built into them which is likely a lot faster).

200Mbit/sec within the confines of a computer isn’t even fast these days (about 20 megabytes per second) – this was achievable by consumer spinning discs a decade ago, and modern NVMe storage (which basically any decent laptop today will be using, and most desktops – my desktop has no spinning storage and NVMe on the motherboard, and it’s 5 years old) and its NVMe SSD will happily sustain speeds in gigabytes per second for sequential reads, so 200Mbit/sec video is rather trivial in that respect. NVMe is effectively your SSD directly attached to the PCIe bus and is an order of magnitude better than SATA. As for the CPU, poking around the internet shows some benchmarks where someone transcoded (in other words, the transcoder had to read and uncompress and then compress and write out the video with a transformation of some sort) of double 4K video (3840 × 4320) at 50 frames per second on the current gen Intel i7.

Alioth, your whole first paragraph doesn’t reflect the current state of the art.

Loads and loads of processes are offloaded to the GPU in any well written modern video editing software. Have a read up on OpenCL. This is especially the case on Mac when using Final Cut Pro where everything is tightly integrated with the hardware. You can edit 4K video lag free and with effects rendered in real time even on mid range Apple hardware.

The video formats use matter too with Apple ProRes being specifically designed for video editing.

It’s best not to compare video editing a Mac with a PC because it’s easy to draw invalid conclusions. You can look at the paper specs of a Mac and thing ‘huh, that’s expensive for what it is’ but it really isn’t that simple.

Very much depends on the detail.

GPU acceleration does somethings very well, others not so well, and with modern multicore CPUs the gap has narrowed dramatically.

Sure you can render really fast if not doing geometric corrections, animated contrast / colour changes etc. Probably 99% of today’s video editing is just loading the video from the camera, maybe cutting out the most boring bits, rendering that, then uploading to facebook or youtube. The result is usually something which nobody will want to watch more than once but it will render fast

I know 20 megabytes/sec is nothing but for whatever reason playing 200megabit/sec mp4 video smoothly is still a hard job on a normal computer. Last time I tried it, nothing in the Apple shop would play even 50mbps smoothly. Could be it doesn’t like the encoding, of course… produced on Vegas on a PC. Maybe if you do everything inside the Apple pipeline then it works.

I’ve not had a problem with playing back 200mbit/sec video on my 5 year old Macbook. Nor on my Debian Linux desktop (which is rather more powerful, having NVMe storage and a top end i7), and nor when I reboot the same machine into Windows (Windows = basically an expensive game launcher :-))

stevelup wrote:

Loads and loads of processes are offloaded to the GPU in any well written modern video editing software

Probably things like effects and stuff that renders new video – but it’s highly unlikely the encoding (and decoding) is done in the GPU, because recent CPUs (for at least the last 5 years) have had dedicated hardware to do this which is likely faster. For typical flying videos, most people aren’t going to bother with effects and such, so the CPU’s ability to encode is probably a bigger factor than having a decent graphics card.