I have a few 8k videos from my phone (7 680 x 4 320 pixels, ~80mbps 23.976fps but sadly variable framerate, mediainfo reports minimum of 4fps and up to 24), these are just some tests I shot at the begining when I thought wow 8k, so cool, then realised it’s not only completely useless but also 4K looks better (as in the dynamic range is very obviously better and I can choose 30/60fps, 8k is fixed to 24fps on my phone).
Did some quick tests on my desktop pc (cpu: ryzen 7 2700x), 8k in a 1080p timeline, quite fluid, actually playable - I think it shows at least half the frames, can even play (very choppy) with a colour grading filter applied. In a 4k timeline it is still acceptable, about twice as choppy as the 1080p but I could work with it.
Now 8k videos in an 8k timeline is just another level of horrible, I’d say there’s 3 frame updates per second and feels like a sloppy slideshow. Shotcut was actually pretty stable, no crash or hang at all of the interface during the test. RAM usage got ridiculous tho, I have 5 files in the timeline totalling 3m50s and it is using 13GB RAM, it started at 4GB and instantly goes up 2 GB every time I seek on a new file.
Exporting at 8k24fps with x265@crf25 uses 95%CPU and 12GB RAM alone, and for the 20s mark I selected it took over 7min (in 1080p the same 20s part took exactly 40s).
Interestingly, my GPU doesn’t support 8k (it’s a 5year old gtx970 so it’s expected) and the export fails after a few % so I don’t know if a GPU would render it in a decent amount of time.
I don’t know what the recommended specs would be but I don’t think smooth playback is possible without some form of hardware acceleration, I’d assume you’d get acceptable (so over 15fps) with a 16 core CPU that can do at least 4.5GHz (with good cooling) and 64GB of ram for short projects (<10min).
For the minimum specs I’d say any recent (last 2 years) mid-high desktop CPU can do it, minimum 16GBs of ram and a lot of patience.