When it comes to video editing, the technical essentials are relatively straightforward:
A computer with enough processing power to handle your project footage.
A source hard drive spitting out frames at a rapid enough rate to keep up.
A connection fast enough to support the necessary video bitrate.
Together, these factors determine your machine’s ability to handle any resolution (4K, HD, etc.), at any frame rate (24 fps, 25 fps, 29.97 fps etc.), with any codec (ProRes, DNxHD, H.264, H.265 etc.) all without lagging.
The more of those elements you combine the harder it gets.
For example, playing back an HD H.264 file is a breeze for modern computers. But processing a 4K 50 fps RAW file, which has far superior image quality and consequently much higher data rates is a different story.
The need for speed
Two other critical aspects of your technical setup are the speed of your source media drive and how it’s connected to your system.
Your source drive needs to be able to read and write the video file for the computer fast enough for it to process every frame. This has to be supported by a connection — a USB 3, or Thunderbolt cable or an internet connection — that doesn’t create its own bottleneck.
For example, a USB 2.0 connection has a data rate of 480 megabits per second, while a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection has a theoretical maximum data rate of 20 GB/s, or 1,680,000 megabits per second.
Addressing this part of the equation is actually a good way to save money. Before you rush out and buy a much better computer, make sure:
Fixing one or both of these is often a more budget-friendly fix.
Also, keep in mind that drives — especially SSDs, which are fast and fairly affordable — tend to lose performance as they fill up. An SSD performs close to its advertised speeds when empty, but can slow significantly once it’s 60-80% full.
Connecting to the cloud
The same principles apply to your internet connection.
We all know the pain of buffering. But when you’re doing something as data-intensive as video editing, your internet connection not only needs to be fast with sizable download speeds — it needs to be reliable.
So it’s best practice to connect to either media cloud storage via a wired internet connection such as an ethernet cable, or to a larger media drive over a wired local area network (LAN).
Wired connections deliver a consistent connection (albeit affected by network traffic loads) while wireless connections can be interrupted, constricted in speed or generally impacted by other wireless interference like walls.
How to get real-time video editing performance from the cloud
