13" Macbook for editing GH4 UHD footage

roxics

roxics

Veteran
I've been meaning to pick up a new laptop for a while. Wasn't sure if I were would make the jump to a Windows machine or not. Decided I would prefer to stay with Mac OS. But I really don't want to spend $3000 on a new laptop. So I'm looking at the 13" models. I prefer that size screen anyway. I'm dong a lot of shooting on my GH4 these days in 4K and even my 2012 mac mini quad core i7 (16GB Ram) has issues with that footage. Wondering how the Kabylake i5 would do and especially the integrated GPU in those machines.

Anyone have one, what can you tell me?
 
Your NLE might be a significant factor in whether a low powered computer will work or not. Are you using Premiere? I don't have first hand experience with the newer MBPs, but I can tell you that my mid 2012 13" MBP (i7, 16GB RAM, 1GB GPU) can't handle Sony A6300 UHD footage. Even with the Intel HD 4000 GPU hacked to 2GBs of virtual RAM, it's still not enough. My tests were with Davinci Resolve Lite 12.5 & 14 Beta, so it's possible I could have had acceptable results with Final Cut X or something. I'd wager though, that you'd need to get the most powerful GPU offered on the 15" models the have acceptable performance.
 
Imamacuser said:
Your NLE might be a significant factor in whether a low powered computer will work or not. Are you using Premiere? I don't have first hand experience with the newer MBPs, but I can tell you that my mid 2012 13" MBP (i7, 16GB RAM, 1GB GPU) can't handle Sony A6300 UHD footage. Even with the Intel HD 4000 GPU hacked to 2GBs of virtual RAM, it's still not enough. My tests were with Davinci Resolve Lite 12.5 & 14 Beta, so it's possible I could have had acceptable results with Final Cut X or something. I'd wager though, that you'd need to get the most powerful GPU offered on the 15" models the have acceptable performance.
Click to expand...

Davinci Lite handles h.264 TERRIBLY. Worse than any NLE I've used. I had a hack with 8GB ram, a quad core i5 and intel hd 4000 and FCP X handled the GH4 4k files pretty good. In Davinci the same footage was choppy and unusable. I upgraded to an Nvidia card and FCP X was better still, but DaVinci was still crap. If the files can play smoothly in Quicktime, FCP X will handle it great.
 
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