So I just started shooting video with my new mini pro 4.  I quickly found out that my current desktop computer doesn’t have enough computing and graphics ability to deal with playing editing these 4K drone videos.  If I was to purchase a new PC, can anyone advise me on the requirements I would need to effortlessly display and edit 4K video on a new PC.  Processor type, amount of memory (RAM) and graphics card type would be the information that would be helpful.  Even a link to a computer that would work for my needs would be very helpful.

  

Thanks in advance.

For my editing needs, I've been using a desktop with an AMD 5800x3d CPU with 32gb of RAM and a NVIDIA 4080 GPU.  For storage I'm using a couple of Samsung m.2 nvme drives.

It all comes down to how much you want to spend.

Yes, it's always a matter of what you're willing to pay. The general advice is: buy the best you can afford

But in general, if I were choosing a computer for 4K video editing today, I would look for used gaming computers. What is important from my point of view (I edit videos in DaVinci Resolve Studio):

- Intel CPU with iGPU. This is really important, the iGPU in the processor (from 11gen upwards) allows you to encode/decode H.264/H.265 much more efficiently than, for example, top-of-the-line nVIDIA 3xxx dedicated graphics cards. And with absolutely ridiculous power consumption.. So an Intel CPU, any version except F versions (F means models without iGPU). My tip for a cheap CPU: i9-11900, can be found cheaply, has a TDP of 65W and has other advantages
- CPU with more cores. Even slower ones, but the number is important
- 32GB RAM is the minimum, 64B is very good, 128GB is ideal
- Fast M.2 SSD drive, preferably PCIe4.0
- Second GPU, dedicated. I would focus on the amount of memory, for example used RX6800 16GB are great graphics cards for reasonable money (although I admit that nVIDIA are slightly better for video editing)
- Quality power supply, preferably oversized, with good efficiency (Gold). At least 650W, but 1000W will mean a minimum noise level and excellent efficiency. I personally wouldn't skimp on the PSU, it will 'survive' even several computer upgrades ..

Thank you, that's a lot of good details to get me started.

I am having Cpu Intel Core i5-14600K + Asus Prime B760-Plus LGA +DDR5 32Gb+M.2 drive, and I would say that it is quite fast in encoding e decoding 4k video

Hi there,
That's great to know you have gotten the needed assistance from other user's.
If you have any other questions on DJI products, kindly let us know. Thank You, have a great day!

Jan Spacil Posted at 6-19 21:46
Yes, it's always a matter of what you're willing to pay. The general advice is: buy the best you can afford

But in general, if I were choosing a computer for 4K video editing today, I would look for used gaming computers. What is important from my point of view (I edit videos in DaVinci Resolve Studio):

Jan,
If you don’t mind, I’d like to pick your brain a little bit more since you seem to have a good understanding of the topic.

When you recommend a Intel CPU with iGPU. I’m assuming that means an INTERNAL graphical processing unit?  That was surprising for me to hear, my assumption would have been a dedicated graphics card is best.  Would the Intel CPU with iGPU be in addition to a dedicated graphics card?  That doesn’t seem likely but I don’t know for sure. You do mention “Second GPU, dedicated. I would focus on the amount of memory, for example used RX6800 16GB are great graphics cards for reasonable money (although I admit that nVIDIA are slightly better for video editing)”.  So it sounds like you are recommending an internal and dedicated GPU?

You also went on to say for the GPU “And with absolutely ridiculous power consumption.” Is that referring the Intel CPU with IGPU or the dedicated nVIDIA 3xxx dedicated graphics card?  Is that referring to ridiculous high or ridiculously low power consumption?
As you can tell by now I'm a little confused. This is an important purchase I'll be making.  I don't mind spending the money, but I want to get it right.  I don't want to find out after purchasing a new computer that it doesn't do what I need it to do.

Thank you so much for your patience with me I really appreciate it.

Hi AntClover,

yes, an iGPU is an internal graphics card integrated into the CPU. It is less powerful for gaming compared to dedicated GPU cards, but on the other hand, it is incredibly powerful for encoding, especially 10bit HEVC.
By dedicated GPU, I mean an add-on graphics card, usually from NVIDIA or AMD. So yes, I do mean having two GPUs in a computer, one in the CPU and the other as an add-on card.

As for power consumption, an iGPU has significantly LOWER power consumption than a dedicated card. For example, the I9-11900 has a TDP 64W (which can of course be exceeded), and according to the specifications, the iGPU part has a maximum power consumption of 25W. In comparison to, for example, the RX6800, where the maximum power consumption is over 300W.

FOr more info, watch this video, for example:

Great information Jan, I'm loving the education and video link. From what I have learned to run both iGPU and DGPU at the same time I have to enable the iGPU in the BIOS. So once the iGPU is enabled how would you connect your monitor or monitors? Will all monitors connect to the dedicated GPU card or the iGPU on the motherboard?

You're welcome, I'm happy to help. Of course, both GPUs need to be enabled and visible in the system and have the appropriate drivers installed. I have both my working monitors connected to the dedicated graphics card (DisplayPort/RX6800).

Jan Spacil Posted at 7-1 00:20
Hi AntClover,

yes, an iGPU is an internal graphics card integrated into the CPU. It is less powerful for gaming compared to dedicated GPU cards, but on the other hand, it is incredibly powerful for encoding, especially 10bit HEVC.

Hello there! We want to express our sincere gratitude for your kindness in sharing such valuable information and the enlightening video. We truly appreciate the effort you've put into sharing these ideas with us and our community of users. Your contributions are highly valued and make a positive impact.

Thank you for your generosity and continued support.

Hello, is it necessary to export the video with invisble stick effect to cloud before saving it to my phone? Can't I just save/download it directly to my phone? Thank you

djiuser_PFDOOgSZsLE6 Posted at 7-3 01:21
Hello, is it necessary to export the video with invisble stick effect to cloud before saving it to my phone? Can't I just save/download it directly to my phone? Thank you

Hi there, thank you for reaching out. It's not necessary to export the video with invisible stick effect. You can still download the recorded video directly to your phone from the DJI Fly app.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

Are you shooting in H.264 or H.265?  H.265 is a more efficient compression standard but will require greater CPU/GPU horsepower for playback and editing.  If you are not doing so already, try shooting in H.264 to see if the video works better on your PC.

Occams Razor Posted at 7-4 08:42
Are you shooting in H.264 or H.265?  H.265 is a more efficient compression standard but will require greater CPU/GPU horsepower for playback and editing.  If you are not doing so already, try shooting in H.264 to see if the video works better on your PC.

Thanks, I’ve try both H.264 and H.265. My PC was once state of the art but those days are long gone, just like me. With the advice from Jan, I’m going to build myself a new PC. All the components should be here this week and I’m looking forward to putting it all together and having a new state of the art up to date kick ass machine. Should be fun.

Jan Spacil Posted at 7-1 10:24
You're welcome, I'm happy to help. Of course, both GPUs need to be enabled and visible in the system and have the appropriate drivers installed. I have both my working monitors connected to the dedicated graphics card (DisplayPort/RX6800).

Hi Jan,
So since we last spoke I've put together a new computer system. Here are some of the highlights.

    • Intel Core i9-13900K - Core i9 13th Gen (Intel is saying that this processor can have instability issues)
    • GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 GAMING OC V2 12G Graphics Card
    • G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB RAM DDR5 Memory
    • SAMSUNG SSD 990 PRO 2TB, PCIe 4.0 M.2 Hard Drive
    • GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX Motherboard
    • Seasonic FOCUS GX-1000 Power Supply

I've been learning how to use a DaVinci Resolve to edit my videos. I'm very surprised that I'm still getting choppy playback during my editing. I've reviewed some YouTube videos on this topic and have set Proxy Handling to Preferred Proxies, and Timeline Proxy Resolution set to ¼.
I've done some 1080p editing and that seems to be pretty smooth. but when I go to 4K It's frustratingly choppy.
My internal graphics card is enabled and I can see both my internal card and dedicated GeForce card active in the device manager. I have both my working monitors connected to the dedicated graphics card
Anyway , I was wondering if you had any ideas on how I could smooth this out. I'm hoping that it doesn't have anything to do with the Intel processor instability issues that are being reported.

https://community.intel.com/t5/P ... 3th-and/m-p/1617113

Let me know if you have any advice or questions.
Anthony.

Is the render cache enabled ?  With my MacBook Pro M3 I can edit 4K HDR videos  and play them smoothly with the render cache  set to smart, without proxies or optimized videos.

Hi @AntClover,

I think this PC build is very well designed, so a few things come to mind:
- Davinci Resolve free version only supports one GPU. So if the PC has two graphics cards, the Studio version is needed for full utilization
- the CPU cooler isn't specified in the build, and the I9 gen13 runs very hot under load. Efficient cooling is needed for both the CPU (with a CPU cooler) and the case (good airflow, intake, and exhaust). I recommend a Noctua CPU cooler (for air cooling) and a spacious case with extra fans: The I9's instability is mainly due to heat issues. But to be safe, I'd update the motherboard firmware to the latest version
- for Davinci settings and slow 4K editing, I recommend this video. It shows how to set up the program for smoother 4K editing. However, with complex Fusion nodes, videos will stutter without caching, and a typical PC might not handle it:

GL and let m know if it helps :]

Oh wow, that's news to me that "Davinci Resolve free version only supports one GPU". So that begs the question Should I disable the onboard GPU while I'm using the free version? I'm not ready to pull the $300 trigger for Studio yet.

There's quite a difference between the free version (Davinci Resolve) and the paid version (Studio). Multi-GPU support is one of them, but it's not as simple as it seems.

Here's a pretty good description of the general advantages of the Studio version: https://www.toolfarm.com/tutoria ... s-the-free-version/

As for GPU support, it's a relatively new thing in the free version, roughly from V18 (or possibly the latest updates in version 17). Older free versions practically had no GPU support at all.
And it's necessary to distinguish between decoding and encoding. With Studio and, for example, an Intel IGPU feeding an Nvidia card, you could gain a bit. The IGPU does the decoding. The GPU does the encoding.
Unfortunately, I'm not such a big expert in this area, I only know that video editing in HLG sped up a lot with the switch to the Studio version, on the same hardware.

There's also quite a difference between supporting 8-bit video and, say, HEVC. Here, the Studio version is still at a big advantage. The free version also has support for HEVC, in a certain way, but if I understood it correctly, the free version uses Microsoft codecs, while the Studio version has its own licensed ones.
The Studio version also has Intel's hyperencode support, which can be a 40-50% speed jump. But I'm not sure if this applies to decoding or just encoding.

Generally, I think investing in the Studio version is a good idea. The Studio version license is lifetime, including future versions for free. The license is for two computers, which can also halve the price if you buy it with someone else. Another option is to buy a license together with a SpeedEditor hardware keyboard (which is great) and it will only slightly increase the price - many people solve the purchase of a license this way and then sell the SpeedEditor for a lower price - there are many auctions on eBay, for example.
For me, features like Speed Warp, HDR support, generally the Neural Engine including Voice Isolation, UltraNR, Lens distortion correction and other features are a pretty good reason to pay for the Studio version.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to judge in which situation it would be better to use an iGPU and when a dedicated GPU. In any case, for encoding, Nvidia will be better, respectively faster. However, it's not that difficult to try it out IRL. Unfortunately, it's not possible to have both the free and Studio versions on one computer at the same time, so I can't practically test this (and besides, I have an AMD GPU, so I can't test CUDA acceleration).

Btw, if you're not using v19 beta, you should try it! There's a huge speed increase for h.264/265 decoding. I'm still unsure if the free version fully supports hardware GPU decoding. This could be a dealbreaker!

Jan Spacil Posted at 8-14 22:49
There's quite a difference between the free version (Davinci Resolve) and the paid version (Studio). Multi-GPU support is one of them, but it's not as simple as it seems.

Here's a pretty good description of the general advantages of the Studio version: https://www.toolfarm.com/tutoria ... s-the-free-version/

Hello again Jan,

Are far as my new PC and video editing, things are going well.
I do have another question regarding BIOS. I was wondering if you had any recommendations on any custom BIOS settings that would help while video editing. My mother board is a GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX and as of yesterday I installed the latest BIOS version.

   • Intel Core i9-13900K - Core i9 13th Gen
    • GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 GAMING OC V2 12G Graphics Card
    • G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB RAM DDR5 Memory
    • SAMSUNG SSD 990 PRO 2TB, PCIe 4.0 M.2 Hard Drive
    • GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX Motherboard
    • Seasonic FOCUS GX-1000 Power Supply

Thanks again for all of your feedback.

Hi @AntiClover! Honestly, I can't give you precise advice, as PC tuning/overclocking isn't really my thing. For me, stability is the most important thing :]
Of course, you can squeeze significantly more performance out of the same hardware, but it often comes at the expense of both power consumption and stability. Everything needs to be cooled much better and you need to take much better care of your hardware overall.
The last time I dealt with this was when setting up cryptocurrency mining, where tuning had a huge impact, but it only concerned the GPU, the motherboard minimally...

Honestly, if you want to experiment, I would probably recommend watching videos on YouTube, searching for something like "GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX bios tuning" or a similar prompt. Personally, I would stick to the manufacturer's recommended settings. You can overclock almost anything, from the CPU, memory, and controllers on the board to the GPU... but it really takes a lot of patience :]

AntClover Posted at 8-13 11:55
Hi Jan,
So since we last spoke I've put together a new computer system. Here are some of the highlights.

I find that disabling Nvidia card in device manager and using only intel CPU graphic doing the job. I can edit and export smooth videos using DaVinci resolve. Furthermore, I use h265 on my M4P(D-log M)  and Neo and also export in mp4, 4K, H265, then I upload it to YT. Video is smooth. I tried other software and got choppy output. I notice that VLC doesn't like h265, but windows player play it smooth. Don't forget to install freeware “HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer”.  Here is an example. Colors are not perfect because exposure was manual, so everything was white needed color correction.   

Thank you for that advise

No need for extreme computer. I tried on 24 core 128GB old enterprise server with Nvidia 1060 6GB but using the method and tips I posted it also works on an old laptop.

One more tip. Don't forget to download LUT for M4P from DJI site and apply it on material recorded in 10bit D-log M. That gives the best result.

Srđan Marković Posted at 10-29 23:30
One more tip. Don't forget to download LUT for M4P from DJI site and apply it on material recorded in 10bit D-log M. That gives the best result.

Can you please explain more about this LUT download? I don't understand what it is, what it does, or how to utilize it.

Srđan Marković Posted at 10-29 23:30
One more tip. Don't forget to download LUT for M4P from DJI site and apply it on material recorded in 10bit D-log M. That gives the best result.

The best result is achieved recording in HLG at 4K and editing the shots for delivering a true 4K HDR video. The LUTs tranforms a Log Video to a Rec409 color space, loosing a lot of dynamic range.

By a gaming PC.  They should have the graphics capabilities you need.  Make also sure to have a lot of disk space.  The videos will soon fill up your hard drive.

No need for new PC just follow instruction I wrote if you have any question just ask me. Although I am old I made a lot of first internet down in 1995 and a lot of document management and first video codecs.... Am I to old yes I am my first pc was Sinclar 81 first computer was pdp with cards. I was pioneer for pc  and working since 1980 on computers.

I have Intel enterprise server with 2 processors 24 cores 126GB memory a;; m2 discs and Maxtor 4TB 4x discs sata 3 in raid 8 pieces. Nvidia 3080 twice. I am software and net engineer and made a lot of software for my enterprise firm more than 16000 employees. Want to have similar but trust me my server is tenth of firm servers, Ok want to have strong machine simolary as I work om nut I have only 512GB ecc memory. I put 4060 cards two. Ok.I also have Dell Inspirion 5420 i7 laptop. I use DaVinci resolve and do 35 minutes video from my Mini 4 Pro in d-log. My giga machine do my 35 minutes video with LUT and transition and title for 12 minutes, my laptop did it for 18 minutes  

Dont rush for extreme computers my G540 old comp with 8gb do h265 codec. If you wanna extremly fast get 10000$ computer, it will do it 2/3 time faster but hey people you can do your videos from m4p on your old computers it works but you have to download and insall codecs and software I said, all freeware and it works. I am in opensource and I work for free making cnc machines to 64 axis and a lot of this and want all free so I told how to make smooth video from DJI products.

As for the player, I highly recommend using (in Windows) MPC, available either separately or, better yet, in the K-Lite codec pack. It will generally solve a lot of video playback problems :]

Regarding GPU settings in Davinci, as I already wrote, there is a big difference between the free version and the paid version (Studio), where the two main differences for us are that the paid version uses its own internal codecs and does not rely on what it 'finds in the OS'. And also that the Studio version allows simultaneous use of multiple and different GPUs if they are available in the PC.
Rendering speed is one thing (of course, the faster, the better), but most of us don't have a problem waiting for the result. What is more important is the speed during editing, and here it is not possible to rely on 'brute force' CPU in everything. But let's be glad that Blackmagic allows the use of at least one GPU even in the free version, which was not possible in the past and was basically the main reason why people bought the paid version (in addition to supporting higher resolutions, there used to be a difference in that too).
So yes, of course, you can use Davinci on relatively weak computers, but if you also work with Fusion and some more complex color grading, then video editing itself is very .. uncomfortable.

And using LUTs .. That's a whole chapter in itself, specifically the one from DJI is IMHO really not good. I'm not saying it's unusable, but the combination of YRGB Color Managed and custom color grading is much better in the end. And the fact that the mentioned LUT 'cuts' the gamut (color space) to a very narrow rec.709, doesn't even need to be discussed much, it's really nothing we would want during editing (the final output is a different matter).