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Macbook Air why slow 4k video edit
- Thread starter snakes-
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Check Activity Monitor to get an idea of where the bottleneck is. It could well be that the CPU or the RAM is saturated. Also what OS are they running? Which application are they editing on?
If it's running low on RAM and paging to disk, simply restarting the laptop with reopen windows unticked can make a massive difference, especially if they've got a large uptime.
If it's running low on RAM and paging to disk, simply restarting the laptop with reopen windows unticked can make a massive difference, especially if they've got a large uptime.
I mean, this shouldn't need to be pointed out, but you're editing 4k video on a 1k screen using a dual core 1.6 GHz computer and integrated graphics.
Ordinarily when we diagnose a performance issue we look for a bottleneck but this whole platform is bottlenecks.
With video, many fast processors, preferably specialized GPU processors, with a fast disk running fewer operations is the key to realtime performance. In your setup, you're likely saturating the disk, processor and GPU just to read, decode and resample the video.
Ordinarily when we diagnose a performance issue we look for a bottleneck but this whole platform is bottlenecks.
With video, many fast processors, preferably specialized GPU processors, with a fast disk running fewer operations is the key to realtime performance. In your setup, you're likely saturating the disk, processor and GPU just to read, decode and resample the video.
Guys, seriosusly these are the worst responses imaginable.
Buddy, heres your answer. 4k natively will not playback at speed on a Macbook Air, its a good machine but underpowered for 4k editing but the solution is simple, you need to edit using proxy files.
Assuming you are using FCPX then this is easy.
More info here:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12702?locale=en_GB&viewlocale=en_US
And if you havent already done so make sure you create proxy media:
And are using them (if you are set using 'optimised/original', then that is why your edit is slow):
Optimised media (otherwise known as a mezzanine file - not too lossy but also not highly compressed) is still good, but you need a beefy machine to play with it. Especially in 4K.
Buddy, heres your answer. 4k natively will not playback at speed on a Macbook Air, its a good machine but underpowered for 4k editing but the solution is simple, you need to edit using proxy files.
Assuming you are using FCPX then this is easy.
More info here:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12702?locale=en_GB&viewlocale=en_US
And if you havent already done so make sure you create proxy media:
And are using them (if you are set using 'optimised/original', then that is why your edit is slow):
Optimised media (otherwise known as a mezzanine file - not too lossy but also not highly compressed) is still good, but you need a beefy machine to play with it. Especially in 4K.
Last edited:
This article talks about the minimum requirements to edit 4K video
https://www.videomaker.com/article/f6/17135-editing-in-4k-minimum-system-requirements
https://www.videomaker.com/article/f6/17135-editing-in-4k-minimum-system-requirements