Davinci Resolve system spec query

Video and Photo Editing
1

I’m admitting defeat. My current laptop is too puny for video editing, and if I want to move up to Davinci Resolve I’m going to need something with a lot more oompf.

Any DR users able to make me a laptop recommendation? I need to be able to travel with it, so it needs to be workable with airline luggage restrictions and not crazy heavy.

I’m looking at one of these. Will it cope or does it need a better GPU?

https://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=2ZC11EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB

All help gratefully received. Mods - please move if I’ve stuck it in the wrong place.

2

Mine does a reasonable job with DR … but in a significant render I find it’s the (non-USB) SATA HDD that limits the performance.

image

3

Interesting. The 16GB RAM is in line with what I’ve read, and it’s the HDD access speed that acts as the blocker - not the 4GB video RAM. I’ve seen lots of stuff saying you need 8GB for editing 4K.

Kind of makes me hopeful that the 2GB quadro card in that HP unit might be ok. I have no idea whether a quadro card is good or not. I always thought they were made by Audi.

4

I’ve never seen mine uses more than about 7GB of RAM

5

Hmmm. I wonder why my current system is behaving like such an utter dog then! It’s got 8GB RAM and a decent processor in it.

6

Just running a render - it’s happily sat at 3GB.

However - CPU is spinning! (Strange - I know I checked once before and found it was HDD limited.)

image

7

I should add - that even though it’s spinning the CPU, it rendered something moderately complex in about 65% of the rendered video time.

Resulting video 3 minutes. Render time 2:05.

I can live with that. It’s when it used to take 30 minutes to render a 3 minute clip I knew I needed something better. :wink:

8

Ok. I might have to investigate my current system a little more. Maybe clear off some HDD space and see if that helps it. Currently about 50GB HDD space free.

I installed DR, imported a short 4K clip shot on GoPro and playback in the viewer was unusable. Stupidly laggy. Even at 1/4 proxy.

9

If I’m editing 4k I sometimes create optimised media … but normally (2.7k) I’m happy using source.

10

Also - DR does take good advantage of the decent GPU, it’s not using the main GPU at all.
Getting a good GPU was an important factor when I bought this laptop.

11

Had this from Black Magic
These requirements include:

A 64 bit operating system as detailed in the Read Me file
A minimum of 8GB of RAM, however 16GB is recommended
An Nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU with a minimum of 2GB of VRAM that supports versions greater than either OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 3.0
A modern quad core CPU or greater

1 Like
12

I’m not a PC user, but wouldn’t an SSD help as well ?

1 Like
13

I run 500gb solid state drive with Intel i7 quad core with 32gb ddr5 ram and a GeForce 1090 gtx graphics card with 5gb ddr4. Also have a 1tb hdd for storage. Works well for me.and render times are pretty small. My laptop is an ever Rog gaming laptop.:grin:

14

About the same spec as my laptop - albeit twice the RAM. But, as I say, I never find it uses as much as 8gb RAM, so not a limiting factor.

15

Have you tried defragging your HDD? If you have files split up, it might help. I used to do this with large projects before rendering and found it helped.
Give Dave Clarke a ring, he’ll give you best advice http://www.dvc.uk.com/index.html

16

Thanks all for your help. When I get home this evening* I’m going to do some serious housekeeping on my laptop and see if I can get it to behave. I’ll keep you posted. If not, you’ve all given me some food for thought on a replacement. I’m sick and tired of having Hitfilm hang on me seven or eight times on every project due to resource constraints, and when I tried to move to DR that was even worse!

*currently on a train, getting thoroughly bored after a day of meetings in London. There’s a reason I gave up regular commuting.

17

that’s an instant speed up for any laptop, my Asus laptop use to take 2 mins to boot into win 10, now, 25 secs with a SSD !!

1 Like
18

SSDs are far better at playing with lots of little files than long/large file read/writes … so for video editing there’s rarely a massive benefit for the extra cost.

That’s why they are so frigging perfect as a boot drive … and all those little system files and drivers.

19

Does your GoPro output H.264 or H.265 (HEVC)?

If you importing H.265 into resolve it will behave as you said. You need a beast of a PC to work with it without transcoding to an edit friendly codec.

6th gen i7 up have HEVC hardware acceleration but even then its a pig to work with.

1 Like
20
  1. I’ve got a Hero 7 Black (which is very nice - ooooh hypersmooth) and it will do HEVC but I opted not to turn that on as I knew it would be massively resource hungry.
1 Like