 So this video got its inspiration from a demo that I saw at the Intel booth at PAX. They were editing 4K video footage from a Panasonic GH4 camera with truly astonishing performance on an 8-core Extreme Edition processor with quad-channel DDR4 memory, etc. So a setup that's not attainable to most people. And the demo would have been really impressive to me, and I've gone, Wow, the power of the 8-core! If I hadn't recently, with a lot of help from Edzel, who also did the science behind this video, discovered that by transcoding 4K video to GoPro's Cineform video codec, thanks to its GPU acceleration, we could get that same performance that we saw in the demo with no significant loss in quality on our video editing desktops here at the office. A mere 6-core Extreme Editions. You can watch the whole video about all of that here. But then I was thinking to myself, this isn't some wimpy tech channel, THIS IS MINUS TECH CHANNEL! So we decided to amp it up a notch. We approached Asus to sponsor a deeper investigation and answer this question once and for all, although admittedly it's one no one has ever asked me. Can you edit 4K video on an ultra-portable laptop? Let's find out. 🎵 Okay, so let's start with a look at the machine that we had Asus send us for science. The ZenBook UX303U. There were a couple of key things we were looking for. One, while not necessarily an ultrabook by Intel's definition, it had to be ultra-portable. It wouldn't impress anyone if we pulled a full-fledged gaming laptop or portable workstation like a G751 out of a backpack and started editing video on it. Number two, we needed a discrete GPU. That is to say a standalone one, not a quiet and hard to notice one. Intel's onboard graphics have made great strides, but a dedicated graphics card, in this case one with CUDA support, is going to do more for most GPU accelerated workloads than onboard can, and we need as much power as we can get if we're going to have any hope of editing 4K. And finally, three, we needed enough CPU horsepower and memory to support video editing at all. So we went for a config with an Intel Skylake Core i7-6500U with 12 gigs of RAM. But is that even enough? Well, we started with a baseline by taking 4K footage right off our Sony FS5, dumping it into a timeline, and trying to edit it. Abominable. I mean, CPU usage was pegged at 100% right away to the point where we were measuring performance in seconds per frame, not frames per second. A7S II footage didn't fare much better with better CPU usage, but up to a four-second delay when moving the playhead to a new spot on the timeline. Yuck. But that's what we expected. So we had a desktop machine transcode 4K footage to Cineform 4K using Adobe Media Encoder, and copied it over the network to the local disk on the notebook, and... Whoa, friends! CPU and GPU usage at full 4K resolution in the preview window was sitting at 70% and 90% or more respectively, with choppy but at least consistent playback. Not bad. Dialing the preview window down to half resolution yields a significant reduction in CPU and GPU use, with one-quarter resolution running at anywhere from 27 to 30 FPS with responsive timeline scrubbing, and 1 eighth able to run at 30 FPS. Solid. Now, it should be noted that frame rate dips were observed across all preview resolutions when additional layers were added, so the experience is not absolutely perfect, but when I popped the big question to Ed, could you edit 4K comfortably on this setup? The answer was, yeah. But hold the phone, Linus! You're ignoring one of the biggest bottlenecks in the video editing process, the export of the finished file. Actually, I'm not ignoring it at all, so there's a couple of different ways you can tackle it. With a watch folder configuration on your desktop, you can finish the file, export it in Cineform, drop it in there, and have that desktop deal with it. But what we also discovered is that that didn't actually end up much faster, if at all, than just exporting in H.264 anyway, thanks again to GPU acceleration. So you can see I'm actually running an export right now. This is a two-minute file that's going to finish in about 17 to 20 minutes, and with GPU usage pegged at 100%, it is using the GPU. Woo! But copying all the project files to a portable device to work on them, and then copying them back or whatever, isn't going to appear in an advertising brochure for a thin and light anytime soon. With wireless connectivity everywhere and the cloud, people are getting used to the idea of just working off of network data and not having to store anything locally on their machines. And while you won't be editing 4K video over the internet anytime soon, I wanted to investigate further to see if we could at least edit directly off of the drive of the more powerful machine or a storage machine somewhere else using a home wireless router. So step one was to enable maximum performance in the power profiles of the machine, and step two was to plug in a wired network USB adapter. So I used the 100 megabit one that was in the box, and the experience was subpar. We're talking five frames per second, regardless of the playback resolution. Running off the low speed Wi-Fi in our office? Yeah, that was a similar story, but our XI3 access points are not designed for blistering speed, they're for range and consistency. So we did make some useful observations here though. We got low CPU usage on our 4K footage and higher CPU usage on the 1080p footage that was mixed into our timeline, indicating ample processing power and a bottleneck somewhere else. Because this is one of the challenges of Cineform. The file sizes are actually larger than the footage directly off the camera in many cases. So we were easily exceeding our connection speed with a 100 megabit wired connection and our office Wi-Fi. So I grabbed a third party gigabit USB to ethernet adapter and boom! Timeline performance got responsive and we were back up to performance that was pretty much indistinguishable from editing locally. Progress! But that still involves a wire, that's not really the point. Could we do it with Wi-Fi? So I dusted off a wireless AC 1300 megabit access point, these typically run around 150 to 200 bucks for a good one, like the TP-Link Google On-Hub one that we checked out recently, and took another crack at it. There we go, boo-freaking-yah! 300 megabit throughput while scrubbing footage, about the same as on our wired connection, and again, pretty much indistinguishable performance on Wi-Fi compared to editing locally. And while there are some caveats, you're not going to be able to get this kind of performance if you're 200 feet away from your access point. What we have managed to do here is validate that it's possible to edit 4K video on a thin and light at your dining room table with a near dual-core Core i7, if you pick the right configuration, namely one with strong Wi-Fi, we tried this same experiment on the Surface Book and it was not nearly as successful, and a dedicated GPU. That part's important because even at one quarter resolution in our preview window, GPU usage on our 940M was sitting at 30 to 40 percent, and we were pegging it when we were exporting finished files. Speaking of graphics cards and video things, what about graphics and other cool video things like VideoBlocks? VideoBlocks provides affordable premium stock video, and they've been doing it since 2011. They operate on a subscription-based unlimited library, and they add new footage to the library twice per month. They've got over, and brace yourselves here, 10 million dollars worth of footage, After Effects templates, and motion backgrounds, and everything in VideoBlocks's unlimited library is 100% royalty-free and yours to use for personal and commercial projects. They recently launched a new members-only video marketplace as an added benefit for subscribers, and they've got clips from contributors around the world that are only available to VideoBlocks subscribers. So contributors on that marketplace, by the way, keep 100% of the sales as commission. VideoBlocks takes no cut since the marketplace is members-only, so they're already supported by their subscription revenue. They've already got 1,500-plus artists with more than 200,000 new clips in the few months since the marketplace launched, and if all that sounds pretty darn good, you can get access to the unlimited library and the marketplace for only 99 dollars per year. But if you use our link, which you can find in the video description box below, it's down there, and if you sign up during the month of December, the clock's a-ticking, so you should do it quickly, you will get one year of VideoBlocks for only 49 dollars, a savings of, well, 50 dollars. To put that in context, one clip of stock video footage similar to those found on VideoBlocks can be bought for as much as 50 bucks, or actually more, depending on what you're using it for. So, if you use the service once, your subscription pays for itself, go check it out today. Alright, thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed. 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