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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Working a lot on the road - Laptop that is better han my Mac Pro 2012? Resolve/Premie

JeanChristophe Dupasquier said:
Maybe somebody can help: How good is the Microsoft Surface Book 2 15" for editing R3D?
Using Premiere Pro, After Effects and Resolve.

Specs look good, altho not sure about that low-power CPU:
- Intel Core i7-8650U (1.9 - 4.2 GHz, 15W)
- nVidia GTX 1060 6 GB GDDR5
- 16 GB RAM
- 15" 3:2 Touchscreen 3240x2160 (detachable for tablet mode)
- up to 1 TB SSD

I usually work my 8K Helium R3D files in PP in a 1080p timeline, playback at 1/2 resolution works fine on my midrange Acer laptop for now. But the Surface Book 2 is tempting!
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You can buy a lot more portable horse power for that kind of money.
 
Misha Engel said:
You can buy a lot more portable horse power for that kind of money.
Click to expand...

Misha does bring up a good point I forgot to mention, I bought my Surface Book mostly for its versatility for non-video related things (which it excels at). The detachable base is really nice for digital art/notetaking/mindmapping/storyboarding. If I was just buying something for video I probably would have gotten something else though (there was another thread with lots of good options in it) with 32 GB’s of RAM and TB3.
 
Would be amazing if you could test .R3D playback in PP (1080p sequence), maybe with Lumetri and 1-2 LUTs applied. If 1/2 res is good it's very tempting for me.

I don't need a very highend laptop, the one I have right now doesn't have TB3 and 32 GB RAM either, USB-C and a high-res touchscreen with pen would be great tho. Just hoping the Surface Book 2 is not slower due to a low-power CPU @ 1.9 GHz.
 
JeanChristophe Dupasquier said:
Would be amazing if you could test .R3D playback in PP (1080p sequence), maybe with Lumetri and 1-2 LUTs applied. If 1/2 res is good it's very tempting for me.

I don't need a very highend laptop, the one I have right now doesn't have TB3 and 32 GB RAM either, USB-C and a high-res touchscreen with pen would be great tho. Just hoping the Surface Book 2 is not slower due to a low-power CPU @ 1.9 GHz.
Click to expand...

Those parts of the Surface Book 2 are definitely the good parts. As for editing r3d, it's sort of mixed results.

With Premiere Pro, for the most part I found with those settings it was fairly smooth, but at points would slow down.
I also tested at full-res 1080p, which was the same but would be choppy more often.
And half-res 2160p, which was just choppy and basically unusable for playback.

For testing why certain points performed worse though, I went back to 1080p Half-Res and found that using Control Panel, the CPU can go from Idle to 100% Usage in about 2.5 seconds where it can sustain itself there for the most part. The bigger problem is the TDP of the chip more-so than the base clock of 1.9 GHz, although they do affect performance together. While idling, clock speeds stay around 3.9 GHz. However, due to it being only a 15W Processor, under a sustained load, it can't handle that 3.9 GHz for very long (maybe about 10 seconds at the most, I should have timed it though). It would reach points where it has to go down from that high speed, footage would become choppy in playback, and then it would stabilize around 2.2 - 2.6 GHz, and be smooth again. Until it goes back up, throttles, and goes low.

Then I imported the comp to AE, just to test with the 1080p Timeline at Half res, and played back (rendered) three frames:
1st took 00:08:07
2nd took 00:09:36
3rd took 00:09.64

I minimized the program to come write this, and in the Background, it uses about 60% or so of CPU, and seems to maintain itself around 2.6 GHz. Little bit of an accident, but good to know regardless.

I might have to do a test where I limit it to 2.8 GHz to see how that fares, since the slow points in playback in Premiere seem to be directly related to when it comes down from it's full boost speed, and not so much from running slightly OC'd.
At the moment I'd say it's good but not great with those points of slowdown throughout playback.
 
JeanChristophe Dupasquier said:
Well I guess it was worth waiting! Just found out about the Dell XPS 15 2018 with i9

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/dell-xps-15-2018

Intel i9 6-core
32 GB RAM
UHD monitor with 100% AdobeRGB
GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
1.8 kg
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For Resolve you might want to have a more powerfull GPU, the GTX 1050 Ti is around 2 TFlops, GTX 1070 is around 6 TFlops and the GTX1080 is around 8 TFlops and believe me Resolve loves TFlops.
For adobe workflow the 1050 Ti is sufficient.
 
Misha Engel said:
For Resolve you might want to have a more powerfull GPU, the GTX 1050 Ti is around 2 TFlops, GTX 1070 is around 6 TFlops and the GTX1080 is around 8 TFlops and believe me Resolve loves TFlops.
For adobe workflow the 1050 Ti is sufficient.
Click to expand...



Thanks for that but laptops with bigger GPU get bulky. I think the new XPS 15 is quite perfect for my needs, and with Thunderbolt 3 I still can add a GTX 1080 if needed :)
 
JeanChristophe Dupasquier said:
Thanks for that but laptops with bigger GPU get bulky. I think the new XPS 15 is quite perfect for my needs, and with Thunderbolt 3 I still can add a GTX 1080 if needed :)
Click to expand...

This approach CAN work, though it's not ideal. I've been doing things this way with an HP Spectre x360 (quad core, Kaby Lake-R), with an external GPU (1080Ti). My eGPU box isn't idea; it's Razer's v1 which has some design flaws that I didn't know about until it was too late to do anything about.

I used that setup to color grade and render a feature film shot in 8K (plus a few 4K drone + Yi action cam shots). Renders are slow as molasses. If I'd had the bux when I started the grade, I'd have done it in Scratch, mainly because as fast as Resolve is, Scratch is shockingly faster. It would have saved time in rendering.

Two other major limiting factors... the processor is a 15-watt processor, so it's limited to around 2 GHz with all four cores cranked. Also, I don't have fast enough disks.

I'm eyeing an HP ZBook Studio x360 as an upgrade for mobile work (to go with a desktop later for bigger things). It has a 45-watt hexacore Xeon, up to 32GB memory, and a bigger GPU supplemented by two TB3 ports rather than one.
 
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