best tablet for 4K/5K/6K editing?

[shooter]

I am considering a mobile solution among these ones:

http://us.vaio.com/vaio-z-canvas

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-au/devices/surface-pro-4#techspec-block

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book#techspec-block

I've read scaring reports on the reliability of Microsoft offer, so is Vaio route better?

Vaio Z Canvas has a quad-core Intel Core i7-4770HQ Intel® Iris™ Pro Graphics 5200.
Surface Pro 4, dual-core Intel Core i7-6650U with Intel’s premium graphics, the Intel Iris 540.
Surface book, dual-core Intel Core i7-6600U chip with Intel’s HD Graphics 520 integrated GPU inside + NVIDIA GeForce GPU with 1GB GDDR5 memory.
All of them, up to 16GB.

Much difference among them?

 

 

[Phil A]

I'm using Davinci Resolve and at least for that program can tell you that none of those are even remotely powerful enough to edit 4k. Maybe with 320x240 pixel proxies.

[Don Kotlos]

I agree with Phil. 

Surface book might give you the best performance for porxy editing because of the d GPU but you will need a desktop even to create the proxies and render the final clip, otherwise you will end up slowly cooking your tablet to death.

[Guest Ebrahim Saadawi]

I can easily edit and colour and render 4K on the aforementioned Surface Pro... I don't use resolve, i use SOny Vegas 13 & premiere PRo (very sophisticated editors/software) and no i wouldn't try to instal RESOLVE on it!  Go ahead with the microsoft, a wonderful piece of kit for your video production.

[Mat Mayer]

That is great to hear. I would love a Surface Pro or Book. Assumed it would be far too weak. I like the way you dont need to plug anything in to them. Instead I believe you plug the whole thing into a dock for a desktop solution wth storage and extra monitor?

[Phil A]

4 hours ago, Ebrahim Saadawi said:

I can easily edit and colour and render 4K on the aforementioned Surface Pro... I don't use resolve, i use SOny Vegas 13 & premiere PRo (very sophisticated editors/software) and no i wouldn't try to instal RESOLVE on it!  Go ahead with the microsoft, a wonderful piece of kit for your video production.

I think that's a good point, what do you want to run on the tablet @shooter ? There's a huge gap between different software requirements and performance optimization. Resolve is probably the worst offender, Adobe is quite optimized. So let us know what is your workflow that you want to use on the tablet.

I'm considering the i5 + 8GB RAM Surface Pro 4 for mobile Adobe Lightroom photo editing myself.

[jgharding]

High end alienware laptops have 4k touchscreens and geforce 980 gpus for best of both worlds. tablets aren't really there yet.

Plus you can upgrade the storage and get 3tb of ssd in there, more in the future, and 32gb RAM and you can add an external GPU for more power.

Gaming and video editing have a lot in common computer wise.

[nicknameinternational]

I have a Surface Book and I just finished editing a little piece in Davinci Resolve. I have a macbook pro as well but picked up the surface book because I like do all my non video work in Windows. I have the i7, 16GB RAM, and dedicated GPU. 

I was editing 4k 24p XAVC-S 100mbps files for this project. First you can forget about 4k editing. I used Resolve to generate proxies at quarter res. Those still wouldn't play back smoothly in the 4k timeline, I turned on smart cache and proxy viewing and still no luck. It would play back very slowly and was unusable. When I set the Timeline resolution to 1080 the performance improved dramatically. There was no stutter and no hesitation. A good editing experience. I did my color correction with a couple nodes of corrections and it still played back well. When it was time for outputting I switch the Timeline back to 4K to export. I found a bug/ limitation though as I could not export 4k using the dedicated GPU. I kept getting an error saying the GPU memory was full. So for the final render I just detached the keyboard and exported with the built in graphics and cpu. It was slow though about 3-4 frames per second going to a UHD h264 for vimeo. 

So does it work? I am personally good with this performance because it's not my main station and I will probably edit most of my personal projects with it. I don't need to see 4K working in the small viewer on my laptop, so working in 1080 and then changing to 4K for export is fine by me. But I do wonder how the Vaio Canvas would perform with it's Iris Pro.