Best laptop configuration for 4K, 6K, 8K, h265

[gt3rs]

What camera are you using? R5?

If yes you will not have hours of 8k as it cannot do it anyway. Then buy a 2 tb delkin card, shoot raw (as raw is way faster than h265 to edit) set camera raw to half resolution in Resolve basically working on 4k raw, do all the edit on a 4k timeline then before final render change to 8k and full raw and render. Basic grading will work complex stuff that requires tons of gpu ram it may fail. No proxy or transcoding needed... My notebook is 2600 usd i9 10980hk gtx 2070.

 

For 1h of 8k it will work for months of 8k no way so it depends a lot on what are your real need... 2 to 10 min final video it works as it is what I normally do.

A 2600 usd desktop will be much better if you can live with a desktop

 

 

[IronFilm]

11 hours ago, kye said:

Proxies are the free option, at least in dollar terms, and you probably don't need to spend any money to get decent enough performance. 

"Free" only in the sense of computing power needed, in that you're enabling a "4K capable" PC to edit 8K via the proxies cheat. 

But you're still spending thousands of dollars more on storage, and thousands of dollars more on your equivalent camera. 
Not counting the value of your time either. 

None of this is likely to make any financial sense whatsoever. 

But perhaps you don't care about money at all. Fair enough, heck I've spent thousands of dollars on Ironman racing over the years, there is no financial logic to that either! And I'd rather someone has the hobby of 8K filmmaking than playing golf. 

[kye]

37 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

"Free" only in the sense of computing power needed, in that you're enabling a "4K capable" PC to edit 8K via the proxies cheat. 

But you're still spending thousands of dollars more on storage, and thousands of dollars more on your equivalent camera. 
Not counting the value of your time either. 

None of this is likely to make any financial sense whatsoever. 

But perhaps you don't care about money at all. Fair enough, heck I've spent thousands of dollars on Ironman racing over the years, there is no financial logic to that either! And I'd rather someone has the hobby of 8K filmmaking than playing golf. 

I was advocating for 1080p Prores / DNxHD proies, so that only requires a 1080p ALL-I capable computer, which these days is almost all of them.

If he wants to shoot 8K and master in 8K then good luck to him, it's the editing experience that is the question.  Plus who knows what kind of hype around 8K is present in the marketplace these days - until clients work out that 8K is pretty well useless and doesn't improve IQ even if it can be broadcast then there might still be money in offering 8K as a service, and considering the state of film-making and 2020 I understand anything to give a competitive edge..

[filmmakereu]

  

18 hours ago, shooter said:

Please don't derail the discussion. This is zero connected with yours. If I have 8K recording, I want to finish my master in the same resolution. This is nothing about delivery. Your battles don't fit.

Future proof can mean one or a couple of decades later. To each his own.

 

Agreed. I am interested on the original topic. It does not make sense focusing around 8k. The title of the thread is very clear. These rantings end completely useless. Empty talk.

 

I have opened a new thread. Something valuable of valid contributors is welcome.

 

[greenscreen]

12 hours ago, kye said:

Fair enough.

Unfortunately, your budget isn't sized appropriately for the resolutions you're talking about.

I think you have three paths forward:

• Give up on the laptop and add a zero to your budget, making it $20000 instead of $2000, then go find where people are talking about things like multi-GPU-watercooling setups and where to put the server racks and how to run the cables to the control room
• Do nothing and wait for Apple to release the 16" MBP with their new chipset in it (this could be a few years wait though and no guarantees about 8K)
• Work with proxies

Proxies are the free option, at least in dollar terms, and you probably don't need to spend any money to get decent enough performance.  I'd suggest rendering 1080p proxies in either Prores HQ or DNxHD HQ.  This format should be low enough resolution for a modest machine to work with acceptable performance, but high enough resolution and colour depth so that you can do almost all your editing and image processing on the proxy files, and they will be a decent enough approximation of how the footage looks.  Things like NR and texture effects would need to be adjusted while looking at the source footage directly, but apart from that you should be able to work with the Proxy files and then just swap to the source files and render the project in whatever resolution you want to deliver and master in.

Yes, proxies are the best option. Output resolution isn't important. You can have whatever you want.

[gt3rs]

48 minutes ago, greenscreen said:

Yes, proxies are the best option. Output resolution isn't important. You can have whatever you want.

This is not true in Resolve, you don’t have enough gpu vram and you cannot render 8k no matter whatever proxy strategy you use.

[Video Hummus]

I would only recommend M1 Mac if you edit in FCP at the moment. Resolve works but would benefit with more VRAM. We will see more powerful M1X or M2 series chips in Apple products by the end of 2021 with more RAM and more powerful GPU. Those machines will most likely bring 8K editing to laptops.

On the PC side I would wait for newer chips from Intel and AMD with dedicated decoding/encoding hardware.

[greenscreen]

45 minutes ago, gt3rs said:

This is not true in Resolve, you don’t have enough gpu vram and you cannot render 8k no matter whatever proxy strategy you use.

Because Resolve power is based on GPU but there isn't only one NLE on earth, isn't it? 😉

[kye]

1 hour ago, greenscreen said:

Because Resolve power is based on GPU but there isn't only one NLE on earth, isn't it? 😉

This conversation gets better and better....   The simple choice of wanting 8K output not only completely dominates the hardware that the OP has to use, necessitates a proxy workflow which the OP seems to be against, but now it dominates the choice of NLE!

Never mind if I hate the computer, workflow, or software....  I have 8K!

I think the OP should really be asking themselves how much 8K is worth in comparison to the other things it looks like they have to trade-off.  I used to be very 4K-centric and was wanting to future-proof my videos as much as possible (which is a genuine thing considering I am basically the family historian so videos will get more interesting over time rather than less) but as I gradually discovered what I liked in an image and what made the most difference to getting those results I have gone down to 1080p.  

My interest in 4K was naive and it was only through learning more about the craft that I realised how little it actually matters.  Everyone is different in their priorities, but when priority #1 means having to compromise on #2, #3, #4, and #5...  it's a good time to question how that stacks up.