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  1. A friend has asked for some assistance in improving performance on his video editing laptop.

    He has a surfacebook3 with nvidia GPU that meets the recommended requirements for editing, he edits using Adobe Premiere Pro.

    He has done some of his own investigating and tweaking of configurations, and has also worked with Adobe support for a number of hours, but editing continues to be a struggle.

    Before anyone takes the route of recommending against editing on a laptop - we really need to approach this from an angle better than throwing money at the problem. Just simply stating to buy more powerful hardware still completely misses the point of a need to understand how to best configure the hardware you have. If we aren't configuring things properly or to optimize performance, than replacing hardware will still be a limited solution, as we'll still be using hardware not configured to it's optimum performance. We need to get to a point where we're certain we have this hardware configured to optimized performance before we can determine if better hardware is required.

    I've already pointed him in the direction of creating and using proxy files. This has helped some. Although I have gotten some complaints that the creation of proxies adds time to the process, and there have been times that the created proxies don't work and they have to be re-created, so it has slowed things down. However, from what I've seen online, based on our hardware, and that we're trying to do 4k editing, I believe creating proxies will be a necessary part of our process.

    The current thing I'm focusing on though is the funky GPU configuration of a surface book 3. The surface book has 2 GPUs, an Intel, and the Nvidia GPU that we actually bought the thing for. I'm not clear as to why Microsoft thought this was a good idea, or how to ensure that we're getting maximum GPU performance from this funky dual GPU configuration. Of course, I started by trying to disable the Intel GPU, since I don't want that one being used. This laptop is connected to a Surface dock 2, with 2 external monitors connected to the dock. Once I disabled the Intel GPU, the external monitors stopped working. The display settings didn't see any external displays I could enable. That left me wondering just what in the heck Microsoft was intending - is this some sort of garbage equipment that technically has a high end GPU, but is configured in such a screwy way that you can only use it on the built in screen? Or is there a way to configure it to utilize the better GPU for external screens? I've not been able to find a clear answer to this. I believe Adobe support may have assisted in tweaking some GPU related settings with the end user, but I don't believe they've addressed this problem. As the end user worked on another project, he found with the use of proxies he was able to accomplish some editing, but he found that he had to drag the project onto the built in screen, it wasn't performing adequately on the externals - which makes sense based on my past observations of the externals not working without the Intel GPU.

    Could anyone offer any specific insight into configuring a Microsoft Surfacebook 3 to utilize the Nvidia GPU on all displays, and does anyone have any recommendations of a good process to follow to ensure optimal configuration of a video editing workstation?
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  2. Originally Posted by armyofquad View Post
    Just simply stating to buy more powerful hardware still completely misses the point of a need to understand how to best configure the hardware you have.
    Premiere is a hog. I tried it once, and its sluggishness was an instant turn-off. If you can add more RAM - do it. Probably you can switch render/prerender options in Premiere to explicitly use the GPU. Turn off all energy-saving settings. Use draft preview mode if it has it (this is different to editing proxies). There is not much you can do beyond it. Throw away Premiere and get more efficient software. Or you can get an inexpensive Macbook Air and edit 8K without proxies.
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