The 8K Stitcher
What does it take to stitch 8K video footage? The TLDR; is a lot of computing power.
Before we get into the build of the computer, let’s go over the reason for the build. We started operating with an i7 8GB iMac. Stitching a 1 hour 8K video would take over 50 hours. Don’t touch the machine, else the time would increase.
When it comes to stitching, the number of cores are key. The cores will be 100% utilized during the stitching process. For the job of the central processor we picked the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950x. The 2950x has 16 cores and 32 threads. All 16 cores have direct memory access.
At the time of this build, all AMD Threadrippers greater than 16 cores loose direct memory access for the cores greater than 16. This is one of the reason we went with the 2950x. It is possible if your application uses a lot of RAM, then you could bottle neck your task and slow down the processing.
Another limitation of the iMac was GPU rendering. A GPU can be used to decode and encode the videos. GPU encoding is faster than CPU encoding. For the GPU in the build we selected a GForce 2070 with 8GB DDR5 memory.
Specifications of the iMac:
- iMac Retina 5k 27 inch (late 2015)
- 4GHz i7
- 32GB Ram
- AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4GB
- 2TB Fusion Drive
Specifications of the custom build:
- Dell 27″ UHD 4K monitor
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2nd Gen 2950x
- 16GB Corsair Quad channel DDR4
- Gigabyte nVidia Gforce 2070 8GB
- Gigabyte Designare x99
- 500GB SSD Sata
- 1TB Samsung m.2
- x2 512GB Samsung m.2
The results are nothing short of amazing. The time to stitch 1 hour of video at 8k went from 50+ hours to less than 10. This is a major improvement over the previously mentioned iMac.
Written by Mark Pipkin