My Smartphone renders 4K-footage 29x faster than my PC

When I came home from a recent travel I had shot more than 270 GB of 4K-videos - which is roughly about 270 minutes together.

I have a very very basic PC with a Celeron 2 core 2,7 GHz processor and 8GB RAM. While that is mostly good enough for me in every day use, cutting selected clips, put them together and export them as a 4K "movie" is very slow - and a preview is next to impossible.

So I tried whether my ASUS smartphone (Snapdragon 875 / 8 GB RAM) could also handle my Nikon Z50 video clips with it's integrated video editor. To my surprise it could and was extremely fast in rendering with a perfect preview.

I put 10 clips together (1,09 GB) in a row and rendered them to a 1min16sec movie.

Rendering time on my PC with Shotcut - 19min55sec
Rendering time on my Smartphone - 41sec

So the phone was more than 29x faster than my PC. I didn't expect this. I actually wanted to buy a new PC just for video editing. But what components would I really need to just equal the processing power of my smartphone? AMD or Intel (i5/i7/i9), which graphic card and how much RAM woud be needed? I would like to hear what your set up on your Notebook or PC is for a similar rendering time. Thanks a lot!

east2west wrote:

When I came home from a recent travel I had shot more than 270 GB of 4K-videos - which is roughly about 270 minutes together.

I have a very very basic PC with a Celeron 2 core 2,7 GHz processor and 8GB RAM. While that is mostly good enough for me in every day use, cutting selected clips, put them together and export them as a 4K "movie" is very slow - and a preview is next to impossible.

So I tried whether my ASUS smartphone (Snapdragon 875 / 8 GB RAM) could also handle my Nikon Z50 video clips with it's integrated video editor. To my surprise it could and was extremely fast in rendering with a perfect preview.

I put 10 clips together (1,09 GB) in a row and rendered them to a 1min16sec movie.

Rendering time on my PC with Shotcut - 19min55sec
Rendering time on my Smartphone - 41sec

So the phone was more than 29x faster than my PC. I didn't expect this. I actually wanted to buy a new PC just for video editing. But what components would I really need to just equal the processing power of my smartphone? AMD or Intel (i5/i7/i9), which graphic card and how much RAM woud be needed? I would like to hear what your set up on your Notebook or PC is for a similar rendering time. Thanks a lot!

Mac mini m1. 8 GB RAM is fine. That's it. Will handle any video codec with ease - hardware encoding and decoding. No need to worry about graphics cards or processors. Yes, I use it. Not based on specs. I shoot 4K, 5K, 6K, 8K and edit and render with it easily.

Basically  you need a video card or IGPU that can handle 264 hardware encoding and decoding. Today that's virtually everything. The other thing you need is software that can use that GPU/IGPU.

Do you have a video card in your computer? What software are you using?

You don't need a high end GPU. They basically all use the same media encoder/decoder.

I've no idea if your software would benefit. Not all software is smart enough to hand off the work to the GPU

You do what Premiere Pro is doing in your smartphone?

east2west wrote:

When I came home from a recent travel I had shot more than 270 GB of 4K-videos - which is roughly about 270 minutes together.

I have a very very basic PC with a Celeron 2 core 2,7 GHz processor and 8GB RAM. While that is mostly good enough for me in every day use, cutting selected clips, put them together and export them as a 4K "movie" is very slow - and a preview is next to impossible.

So I tried whether my ASUS smartphone (Snapdragon 875 / 8 GB RAM) could also handle my Nikon Z50 video clips with it's integrated video editor. To my surprise it could and was extremely fast in rendering with a perfect preview.

I put 10 clips together (1,09 GB) in a row and rendered them to a 1min16sec movie.

Rendering time on my PC with Shotcut - 19min55sec
Rendering time on my Smartphone - 41sec

So the phone was more than 29x faster than my PC. I didn't expect this. I actually wanted to buy a new PC just for video editing. But what components would I really need to just equal the processing power of my smartphone? AMD or Intel (i5/i7/i9), which graphic card and how much RAM woud be needed? I would like to hear what your set up on your Notebook or PC is for a similar rendering time. Thanks a lot!

The key is the GPU - it *has* to support hardware acceleration of whatever codec the camera shoots in and whatever format you want to export to.

It also helps if it has significant amounts of VRAM - Resolve can get a bit finicky if you are doing 4k with less than 6GB of VRAM.

NickZ2016 wrote:

Basically you need a video card or IGPU that can handle 264 hardware encoding and decoding. Today that's virtually everything. The other thing you need is software that can use that GPU/IGPU.

Do you have a video card in your computer? What software are you using?

Some newer cameras require H.265 instead of H.264 now - I'm guessing that's part of the problem since I'd expect even a basic 2019 machine with integrated GPU to do hardware H.264 up to 4k.

east2west wrote:

DMKAlex wrote:

You do what Premiere Pro is doing in your smartphone?

Hi DMKAlex, sorry but I don`t have that software. I can't even find it in the Google PlayStore.

Premiere Pro is a very a popular NLE among professionals and serious amateur. I would say, among Davinci Resolve, they are the leading NLE among the video circle.

What kind of editing that you can do with your smartphone then?