I’m thinking about replacing my main PC for a steam deck.
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Video editing requires heavy amounts of cpu, ram, and is detailed enough where you would want a large monitor with keyboard and mouse most times.
Deck is great for a lot of things, I would say this is not one of them. Can you do it? Sure, you can cook an egg on the back of it while you render for 36 hours. Should you? Probably not.
Even docked?
Plugging it in may give it more power, but doesn’t triple the CPU power.
That sounds like a terrible idea honestly.
oof, I’d connect it to a display, would that improve it? Or is it something else entirely?
The problem isn’t (just) the display, it’s the… well, everything else
Edit: not to say that you couldn’t or shouldn’t try it out. Shit, might work out depending on what you want to do
1080p video editing, 2.7k at most. 60 fps.
Looking at your old PC specs it should be fine, but keep in mind that davinci resolve is the only big video editor that supports Linux (there’s also kdenlive, but it’s not as popular)
When i tried to get resolve running on stock steamdeck, it fell on the app launching to an error message about not finding your gpu.
Can’t Blender do video editing too?
Honestly it largely depends on your main PC specs, but like you are hearing from others. It probably isn’t a good idea.
My main PC is an i3 from 14 years ago. It has an SSD and 6 gb of ram so it is serviceable.
Yeah the steam deck will be faster than that. 4K video editing? Not gonna be great but it might be tolerable. 1080p? Heck yeah.
Fucking hell, you and I have vastly different definitions of “serviceable”
I mean, I still play Diablo 2 and AoE2. I make music on my main PC too.
D2 & AoE2 - one does not need more to be entertained for months.
Or a lifetime
More people need to be frugal just as you. Huge respect for you man.
I just use tech for as long as it works. I only replace it when something fails and there’s no way to fix it.
I think happiness is not about getting more and more, it’s about appreciating what you already have. Getting more and more didn’t make me happy, doing stuff with it did. And if someone else made art with less than half of my current resources, it is my technique that should be improved, not my infrastructure.
This Ted talk changed my life: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_steindl_rast_want_to_be_happy_be_grateful
I found happiness in appreciating everything, doing stuff and being with the people that I love.
Based on this added info I think it would be a major improvement. So I’d say go for it!
I’ve actually done a tad bit of video editing on my Deck through Kdenlive and in short, it works.
I think a general issue is that Kdenlive tends to crash in of itself a bit. The biggest limitor is probably the lack of GPU based hardware exporting available for the Decks APU in Kdenlive. As well as the 16GB of RAM.
What I specifically did was load in a video file about an hours length, cut it down and overlay some recorded audio to it, sync it up and export. It was sluggish, froze every now and then and crashed a couple of times. RAM and CPU usage was continuously at high. If I remember correctly, the video was in 4K recorded on an iPhone in HDR. At least the source video was, I can’t recall if I scaled it down to 1080p or not.
I do want to mention that I’m not running SteamOS on my Deck however. I believe at the time I was running Bazzite and now I’m running Nobara. I haven’t tried doing this on SteamOS but I would imagine the experience would be more or less the same.
Will it work? Yes, kinda. Will it be as good as an experience as running it on a full fledged desktop with more RAM, higher end CPU and a somewhat modern dedicated GPU? No, it won’t. It’ll work in a pinch or if you have time and patience.
Thank you for your answer! This does help me a lot to make a decision. Thank you very much!
I’m glad my tinkering could be of use to you!
I run my Deck as my primary computer and have been for about a year or so now. About 10 months without any Windows computer or alternative computer around. It’s been shugging and tugging away at all my projects where I do audio editing, gaming, voice chat, using my Sony camera as a webcam, editing sheet music through MuseScore, intensive web development and managing my servers.
There’s a lot that can be done with the Deck and I’m sure I’m in the 1% if not less of people using it as intensively as I am. I’ve made sure my Deck has a lock screen and has full disk encryption through LUKS as well which both is important to me since I work a lot on it when I’m away from home.
If you have any more thoughts regarding using the Deck as more of a PC I’ll happily share some tips and answer any questions!
