hey everyone, so I’ve been using Shotcut for a while now and lately it’s been really slow and laggy. like the playback stutters, rendering takes forever and sometimes it just freezes completely. super frustrating especially when I’m trying to finish a project.
I started wondering if the problem isn’t Shotcut itself but just my laptop not being powerful enough. like maybe I need more RAM or a better processor to run it smoothly.
people in the community said that Shotcut works way better on a PC than a laptop because laptops usually have weaker CPUs and less RAM. they recommended at least 16GB RAM and a dedicated GPU if you wanna edit without all the lag. also said a desktop PC is just a smarter buy if you edit videos a lot.
been looking around for good deals on PC hardware and honestly still figuring it out. if anyone has a laptop or PC they’d recommend for video editing drop it below, would really help me out!
The first step in fixing a problem is diagnosing it, and it sounds like you’re just guessing as to what the issue is. You don’t say which operating system you’re using, but whatever it is, it will have some performance monitoring tools that can show you the utilization levels for resources such as CPU, memory, GPU, and disk I/O. Use those tools to find out what the bottleneck is, then use that information to guide your search for improvements.
It’s true that laptops generally compromise performance, for a number of reasons, including that the size and weight of the CPU and GPU coolers are much more limited compared to a desktop (the CPU cooler alone in my desktop is several time thicker than a common laptop and weighs almost as much as the entire laptop). That doesn’t mean you can’t get good performance on a laptop, just that the ceiling is higher in a desktop.
As for the GPU, remember that how much (or even if) Shotcut uses it depends on your settings. Shotcut can use the GPU for decoding the videos you’re using as inputs, processing the videos (including things like filters), and encoding the video you’re exporting, but each of those is determined at least in part by whether you’ve chosen to use those features. If you’re not using them, then the GPU plays very little role in the workflow. There’s a FAQ entry about that.
What is your Settings → Processing mode? the 10 bit modes are significantly more cpu intensive, if you’re not using 10bit footage (if don’t know what this means, you probably don’t use 10bit) make sure you switch to the first option: “Native 8bit CPU”.