Still behind the ball on hardware :-(

[bynd2whls]

Hey all I was on a while ago and I didn't have a computer hearty enough to edit 1080, well I bought a computer, then a few years have past, and I find myself back in the same position. I recently got a mavic pro, and a dji osmo action, and I love them because they make nice smooth video, but my computer can't edit them. I also have a Samsung gear 360, I can't even use it because I have no way of working with the video.
My computer now is a dell optiplex 990, core i5 , 2.7 quad, 8 gb of ram, but has onboarx video, running windows 10. I usually use Camtasia or vegas pro, but I'm not against others.

I shot some video with the osmo the other day and it looks great, I can watch it on my galaxy s20, but not my comp

What is the minimum video card you think I would need to edit 4k video?

 

[Hippo-Drones]

I don't know about minimum specs, but you would need a decent graphics card, probs i7 CPU and at a minimum 16Gb RAM.
My PC mostly can handle everything I throw at it so far, editing 360 video, multiple camera editing at 2.7k/60 etc.
I think the last video I edited came from 2 x 360 cameras and 2 GoPros (8 & 9), and around 400Gb of footage from the days riding.

I currently have 2x GTX980Ti graphics cards in SLI, am hoping to go back to a single graphics card on my next computer upgrade.
Ryzen 7 3700X 8 core processor - 3.59 GHz
64Gb RAM

In the past I believe video editing loaded the CPU more than the graphics card, but I think now a lot of the editors are using the graphics cards as well.

You shouldn't need the set up I have to do 4k if just using 1 or 2 cameras, but I'd def get more RAM, and def look at going i7

 

[scooterwuf]

Sounds like it could be a combo if needing both more RAM and a more robust graphics card. If you have an external hard drive I would keep all of your footage and editing files on that, to pull from and save too. That way you allow your computer to just run your editing program instead of doing that and managing your files as well. If could improve its efficiency and speed.

- Wolf

 

[bynd2whls]

So, I am running 2 external 2tb hard drives. I will look into a new gpu, but they are outrageous right now. @HippoDrone what is the advantage of dual gpu?

 

[Hippo-Drones]

none these days, it is why I want to go back to a single graphics card. When I had the PC built it was something a few folk were doing as it was thought it would help in splitting tasks up, but I don't think it caught on and most programs, games, editing software, etc all work more effectively on a single card, mine still performs a lot better than a single 980Ti, but the current top end cards will out perform my set up with just the one card. Due to the current shortage in graphics cards I should be able to sell these pretty easily once I can get hold of a better one.

 

[Dewey316]

I am actually a little surprised you can't at least play it back.

I use Davinci Resolve, and I don't have a super powerful computer (older i7, with a GTX1080 GPU), I do have to be aware of my order of editing. Once I put things like re-timing curves on clips, it eats the CPU/GPU up, I make sure those are the last things I edit, then let the render work on it for as long as it takes. Same with the 360 footage, I can play it back and edit ok, but exporting the 360 footage takes a very long time, but I can play it and work with it in the insta360 program.

Does your editor have an option to lower the playback resolution during editing? I know with mine, I have it set so no matter what the input file is, in my editor I have it set to only displays 720p/30, so it doesn't have to work so hard displaying stuff, then when I go to export the final video it will finally do the full resolution. It might be worth looking at the settings in your programs, and do some internet searches. There is no reason you need to edit in 4k, you just need to see the video well enough to edit it, you just need to the output at the end to be in 4k.

 

[Moto Mengy]

I had a 10 year old PC when I started motovlogging and it struggled with editing badly. It would take me 3-4 hours just to compile a video for uploading.

Half a year ago I built myself a new PC, not super high end but above average, and it was worth every penny. I can now edit anything and compiling a 15 minute video takes about 15-20 minutes. That's with my old 970Ti card too, once I get a newer graphics card it will do even better.