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4K - is there any point?

The problem with the CPU hardware is that it’s baked in at time of manufacture. Your 5 year old CPU isn’t, for example, going to support HEVC.

On the other hand HEVC is so heavily patent encumbered that virtually no one uses it, and plain old video encoding is most likely to run faster on a general purpose CPU than a GPU anyway, so the GPU is still not all that relevant in this respect.

Andreas IOM

You’re getting bogged down arguing about video encoding which isn’t something I even mentioned – it was you that brought it up!

I just picked HEVC as an example of something which is not natively supported (for encode or decode) on a five year old CPU. There are plenty of newer codecs that are not supported on even newer CPUs. Hard baking codecs into a CPU only works for as long as that codec remains popular.

I thought we were talking about video editing and how even a half decent Apple laptop can happily edit 4k stuff in real time whereas an all-singing, all-dancing Windows machine with specs that on paper look better than the Mac may chug along.

I’m not sure why you’re so against accepting the fact that a GPU helps with video editing. I can categorically tell you that FCP offloads lots of stuff to the GPU if available, and it really does offer a tangible benefit. Heck, there are stacks of audio plugins that use OpenCL or CUDA now! It’s got nothing to do with 2D/3D. It’s just an additional compute resource.

You can edit 4K on a PC in “real time” no problem.

It is just not as smooth with some software as editing HD, if you have things like the preview window set to max quality.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

stevelup wrote:

I’m not sure why you’re so against accepting the fact that a GPU helps with video editing.

I’m not against it.

It’s just not likely to be a factor if you’re editing aviation videos and you don’t need effects. You simply don’t need a £500 gaming video card to do that kind of video editing, and then the most resource intensive task remaining is encoding and decoding, and by the time the encoders baked into the CPU are no longer popular, that CPU will be at least a decade old, if not older.

Andreas IOM

Any GPU at all is better than no GPU – you’re putting words in my mouth! I never mentioned £500 gaming GPUs…

We’re talking about the relatively low end GPUs that are built into Apple laptops. Even the integrated GPUs in Intel CPUs offer OpenCL capability.

Peter wrote:

You can edit 4K on a PC in “real time” no problem.

It is just not as smooth with some software as editing HD, if you have things like the preview window set to max quality.

Isn’t that just confirming my point? It kinda works, but you’ve got to make some compromises.

Life is full of compromises… Apple have the advantage of a very small range of known GPU hardware, but for these uses the GPU doesn’t do much, nowadays. 10 years ago, the advantage was massive.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

stevelup wrote:

Any GPU at all is better than no GPU – you’re putting words in my mouth! I never mentioned £500 gaming GPUs…

I’m not putting words into your mouth – I never said you said that. (It was Peter who implied you needed a high end graphics card).

You can’t actually buy a PC without a GPU any more. For straightforward editing with no effects (which most people cutting up their flying footage want), the GPU is really not going to be a factor anyway, that is the only point I’m trying to make, and any CPU made within the last 5 years will have hardware support for encoding/decoding the compression types that will be popular for at least the next 5 years (which will be the most resource intensive activity you’ll encounter while doing simple video editing with no effects). That’s all I’m trying to say, that the need for some high end monster of a machine is overstated.

Andreas IOM

I still don’t get why so many machines don’t play high bitrate video smoothly.

And the other 4K issues, e.g. hosting it, don’t go away.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Much depends on whether the system is using P – progressive or I – interlaced, which will also lead to how something is compressed. It is not necessarily special effects that eat processing power but movement and colour range. In high end studios complicated special effects tend to be layered and rendering times (within limits) tend to be accepted. They have to be because directors are always trying to push the boundaries.Most high end editing tries to keep the raw footage in tact, although the actual edit may be carried out at lower resolution for speed. In the final edit the raw footage will be conformed to the edit. This final conform needs either a huge amount of processing power to do it in real time or rendering at slower speeds, which I believe is what Peter is trying to get at. If you are editing for You tube you don’t need to conform to 4k, just the quality used by you tube.

France
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