Running Davinci off a laptop specs

I am pretty bad at understanding computer hardware to tell if I have a proper system to efficiently run Davinci, or knowing what I need to upgrade in order to get it to work.

I shot some 4.6K RAW footage with the new blackmagic RAW at 12:1
I am currently on the road and just want to know if my macbook pro is even capable of smooth playback because what I am experiencing now is awful. Just very choppy even with the rendered cache and resolution set to a quarter. I tried optimizing the footage, but the status bar just sits at 0% (I left it over night) I optimized a couple clips successfully but still got choppy playback. I am running the footage off of an external hard drive with USB 3.0 which I am sure is another factor to take into account.


Here are my laptop specs.

Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
Memory: 16 GB


Wondering if this is just impossible on a system like this and what would be the baseline to run it.

Your description i still a bit too generic to make something of it you should mention also the "year version" of the macbook pro, Goto the upperleft apple icon > about this mac > overview

Mine says "early 2015" as an example....
size of the screen.. and which GPU your model mac has... would make "the picture complete"

btw. did you use the BMD speed test on your internal and external drives ? that could tell you at least something.
I guess the BMD website should have also enough info, don't know if the beta testers are alowed to help or give info... right now...

Sorry about that. It is a 15" mid 2015 Macbook pro. with a Graphics card: Intel iris Pro 1536 MB.

I have not run that test yet.

Also the footage I shot is a mixture of 60fps and 23.976

Mixed frame rate footage isn't good also, how do you adapt/convert ? no audio sync issues ?
both source outputs should have the same frame rate, would be a good start.