What add-on components might speed up my 30min lag times?

I love DR but speed is a major issue. I was running an earlier version and am now running 17 beta 9 and, for example, with a 2 second clip and playback set to 1/4 resolution to speed things up, magic (admittedly with 4 strokes and set to "Better" rather than "Faster"; see image)

Screenshot 2021-02-15 022405.jpg (79.24 KiB) Viewed 516 times

took hours to run through the 2 seconds of video to process the mask on the rest of the frames.

Also, as you can see the markers, which on the 1st frame correctly identified the face and ignored the hair, move around on the face and the mask looks like an amoeba. I'm guessing that, at the end of the frame processing it corrects this but things run so slow that while it's processing for hours it's hard to tell what it's doing.

I have a Dell Inspiron 5570 laptop which, though certainly not an image processing machine, has been reasonably quick with other editing software. Question: Is there an add-on component (software or hardware) that I can buy/get that will speed up this processing?
Thanks!
John

You can pound in a nail with a wrench, the job will get done.

But a wrench is not the right tool for that job.

For this job, Laptops will forever be wrenches.

The proper tools here are hammers and desktops.

Normally, you can't change the GPU in a laptop. I second Jim's notion, get a serious desktop machine for serious work.
Resolve definitely is demanding on the hardware.

There's no software add-on that speeds-up anything. By definition an "add on" would require even more system resources to do it's job, so that's not the way.

If you haven't already, add as much RAM as possible to your laptop but ultimately what you should do - unless your laptop isn't capable of handling it - is add an external GPU since that's where all the processing gets done.

DR is a resource-heavy editor and the minimum system requirements are posted both in the downloads section and the sale literature.

Ultimately if you really want a smooth 'n fast editing experience you need a tower, with tons of RAM (DR breathes big if you give it more than 64GB of RAM especially for Fusion comps) an image-crunching GPU and a fast RAID array so that you have read-write speeds in excess of 1500MBps.

There's tons advice on setups for Windows here on the forums and websites dedicated to creating an optimal edit-rig. Lots of info, dig in.

I didn’t notice this until using a friend’s older Mac, but with magic mask, drawing shorter strokes significantly speeds up the initial tracking process.

I’ve also had better luck with turning the “smart refine” value lower, rather than higher, and instead of pushing the smart refine matte refinement controls to try to close holes, it’s better to use the normal tracker on big, basic interior shapes, and use the power windows as solid mattes, just be sure to layer those on *after* magic mask.

And remember, magic mask is a pre-trained machine learning approach. It will only be good at finding “torso” if the torso you’re showing it looks something like the ones it saw in its training data; you can’t make it be better at doing something it doesn’t know how to do. In other words, if it’s not working well, you might need to consider a more traditional approach.

Oh, and my $.02 on hardware power: don’t fool yourself into believing that you need bigger and better iron to be more creative. That’s an excuse. Necessity is the mother of invention. Style is born from pushing the limits of available technology, so push the limits of whatever’s available to you, and ignore the marketing hype as much as possible.

Second that. Magic Mask is not a miracle solution to every situation where you need to isolate a person.
Instand of investing into hardware, have a look at one of the best tools in the industry: Mocha.