System Requirements
Minimum Specifications
Section titled “Minimum Specifications”Onset Engine is designed to be accessible while still delivering professional-grade results. To run the application, your system must meet these minimum requirements:
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit or higher (macOS support via MPS is experimental)
- CPU: Any x86 CPU from 2020 or newer (Intel Core i5/i7 10th Gen+, AMD Ryzen 3000 series+)
- RAM: 8 GB
- Storage: 5 GB of free disk space (for the application and bundled AI models)
Recommended Specifications
Section titled “Recommended Specifications”For the best experience, especially when working with 4K footage or large clip libraries, we recommend the following:
- OS: Windows 11 (macOS 14+ experimental)
- CPU: Intel Core i7/i9 12th Gen+ or AMD Ryzen 5000 series+
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3070 or better (with at least 8GB VRAM)
- RAM: 16 GB or more
- Storage: NVMe SSD for fast media access and caching
The Role of the GPU
Section titled “The Role of the GPU”A dedicated GPU is completely optional but highly recommended.
Here is how Onset Engine utilizes your hardware:
- Ingest & AI Analysis (CLIP): When you ingest footage, the engine extracts frames and analyzes them using AI (CLIP embeddings, scene detection, motion analysis). This process is heavily accelerated by a GPU (via CUDA on NVIDIA or MPS on Apple Silicon). If no GPU is found, the engine will automatically fall back to CPU inference. It will work perfectly, but the ingest process will be significantly slower.
- Hardware Encoding (NVENC): For exporting video, Onset Engine supports hardware-accelerated encoding (like
h264_nvencandhevc_nvenc) on compatible NVIDIA GPUs, drastically reducing final render times. - Rendering & VFX: The actual video rendering and visual effects pipeline (via MoviePy and our custom VFX core) relies heavily on the CPU. The engine uses multithreading (
max(4, os.cpu_count()-2)) to process frame transforms in parallel. Therefore, rendering works great on a fast CPU, even without a powerful GPU.
Example Hardware Configurations & Expected Performance
Section titled “Example Hardware Configurations & Expected Performance”| Configuration | Ingest Speed | Draft Render | Final Render (1080p, 30fps) | Final Render (4K, Prestige VFX) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Laptop (i5, 8GB RAM, No GPU) | Slow (~0.5x realtime) | ~30s | ~2-3 mins | ~10-15 mins |
| Creator PC (Ryzen 7, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060) | Fast (~2x realtime) | ~15s | ~1 min | ~3-5 mins |
| High-End Studio (i9/Ryzen 9, 32GB RAM, RTX 4080) | Very Fast (~5x realtime) | ~10s | < 1 min | ~1-2 mins |
(Note: Actual times vary based on the complexity of the driver, the source footage resolution, and the selected style preset.)
Codecs and Formats
Section titled “Codecs and Formats”Onset Engine supports all major video containers (MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WMV, WebM) and exports using H.264 or HEVC encoding. FFmpeg and MPV are bundled with the installer — no additional software is needed.