Is anyone currently using a laptop powerful enough to smoothly handle 4K and many tracks and filters on Shotcut without using proxy or preview scaling?
Hello Bentacular,
I have an asus laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX / RTX3060 / 64GB RAM and I have M1 Mac mini /16GB RAM. The Mac mini in my case is way faster than my Asus laptop when it comes to Shotcut. Apple recently released the M4 chip and it’s way way faser than the M1. if I have to choose a laptop for Shotcut, it would be a macbook with the M4 chip.
If I was in the market to buy I think I’d be looking at an M4 as bang for buck performance looks good. To mention, computer wise, I’ve never strayed from a PC before but would now.
I have an asus laptop.
CPU: Core i9-13900h
RAM 16 gb
SSD 1tb
If the laptop is powered from a socket, it smoothly plays a track with a video file in 4k format and in a 4k project. But due to the lack of hardware acceleration of playback, I could not force it to play files with 60 fps, visually it is about 30. Playback without a proxy and without reducing the scale of rendering on the timeline. But it is worth adding the SPR filter, the frame rate drops sharply, you have to adjust “preview scaling”.
Enabling GPU effects does not help, and even makes it worse because of the integrated Intel video card. But if you use proxy and preview scale, everything will work quickly and without any problems.
This has been extremely helpful. It’s good to see that at least an i9 has a chance. A great point on the SPR filter because it’s the most used filter on my end. Do you think that bumping the RAM up to 32 or even 64 would help?
No, the amount of RAM will not affect the speed of the SPR filter. I made a special demonstration of how my process manager works and it is very clear that during the shotcut operation my processor and video card are weakly loaded, in order to make it smooth, I have to use a proxy and preview scale.
When the RAM runs out, Shortcut freezes in Windows 10, in Windows 7, Shortcut sometimes displays a warning that the RAM is running out.
RAM is needed to process a large amount of material. In the test above, the laptop has an integrated video card, so such a small amount of material takes up a lot of RAM. That is, in the example above, the video card memory takes up RAM immediately. Even with a weak processor, you can process video (probably).
This is an example of my project. There are two windows 12 video tracks and 14 seconds of clip made. There is 4k material the project is set to 1920 x 1080 60 frames. I have a discrete graphics card.
I’m more interested in the question of whether the work of shortcut and other video editors depends on the codec used in the video.
This is what the “Convert to Edit-Friendly” feature tries to solve. Editing 4K HEVC might show some stutter, but convert it to 4K DNxHR and it might work much better (assuming your disk speeds can keep up).
The tradeoff is, of course, conversion time and disk space. In my case, I let conversions and proxy generations run overnight because I don’t edit videos the same day that I shoot them.
Thank you, this is the answer I’ve been looking for. My hard drive is small, but I work with short videos, sometimes I need to transfer a few seconds to After Effects and back. I used the ProRes HQ codec for intermediate operations, what can you tell me about it? And if I encode without compression, will it be better? But I didn’t find such a codec in Shortcut.
People prefer lossless over pure uncompressed now, but you will need to figure what is compatible with After Effects. One reason why people use visually lossless a.k.a. Intermediate like ProRes since it is more compatible. Does AE support Shotcut’s lossless/H.264 preset (turn off hardware encoder)?
Yes, After Effects supports the lossless/H.264 codec. By default, there is a GOP of 25 frames, if you set GOP 1, then the size and bitrate of the video will be close to DNxHR HQ, I used it last time on Austin’s advice and was able to do the necessary operation without freezing. But even though I did not choose Conctant bitrate DNxHR HQ, it is exactly this one that is set in the video properties. So what codec would you advise me to use to transfer the video to After Effects?
If After Effects is being used for motion graphics design-type work, then a lossless codec is preferred. This prevents any color smearing from appearing in flat-color areas, and keeps line edges crisp through multiple encodings.
Lossless H.264 with GOP 4 is a good balance between fast seek speed and small file size, but will need pix_fmt=yuv422p added to the Export > Advanced > Other tab to retain the most color detail.
DNxHR HQ is a great fallback option if for some reason it is faster to scrub or smaller in size. It would take a severe edge case for DNxHR to look visibly worse than lossless H.264… but those rare edge cases are more likely to appear with flat illustrated graphics as opposed to live-action footage.
The whole point of GOP 4 is that the decoder has to decode a maximum of four frames to reconstruct a seek point, which can be done relatively quick and might even be in the frame cache. If GOP went up for a higher frame rate, seek time would slow down due to more frames being decoded, which is not what we want. Therefore, GOP 4 is a good balance regardless of frame rate.
I see you are well versed in this issue. You wrote advice on encoding the footage so that it could be used for editing later. I don’t have a video camera, so I don’t understand this. But it seems to me that a good video camera immediately encodes with a codec that uses an algorithm that is less demanding on processor resources. Is there a need for such an operation if using proxy files?
I have a different task, to flood this topic (joke). My task is to pull out a piece of a video from a project in Shortcut and put it in the After Effects project, then transfer it from After Effects back to Shortcut. The length of such segments is usually 3-10 seconds. In After Effects, I usually cut out a person, color the scene, use blur, which is not available in Shortcut, and I used to play with particles. Since I only recently learned how to pull out pieces, in the future I plan to make transitions in After Effects or pull out transitions from Premier Pro, I have a large collection downloaded from the Internet. For such a task, I do not look for balance. I need it to just work, After Effects places the entire timeline in RAM. What if there is a codec with which the RAM will be less loaded?
Then there is another rendering operation. In After Effects, a crash can also occur during rendering due to a lack of RAM. I noticed that some codecs take up less RAM during rendering but take longer to render, this is V9, After Effects does not support it. Or did it seem to me? If the video is encoded with a certain codec, then it is easier for the computer to work during rendering if you select the same codec?
Also, if you encode h.264, then if the render fails, nothing is left. Sometimes I just render in pieces, starting from the place where the failure occurred, but not all plugins in After Effects can do this.