- Hey, everybody.
This is Roberto Blake of robertoblake.com,
and I'm geeking out with you today
over something really cool.
We're actually going to geek out over choosing
a video editing laptop.
Now as many of you know,
back during the summer I bought this Asus laptop.
This Asus laptop has been what I've been using
for graphic design and for video editing when I'm on the go.
This was actually a great deal on budget for under $600,
but it's not the only solution for video editing
and I'm going to talk about how you choose
a video editing laptop,
both on a budget and also if you have
a little bit more money to invest and spend on it.
So we're going to cover some
of the basic requirements right now
for video editing laptops
so you can help make your choice
and have an informed decision going into this.
I will say it does depend on
the nature of your video editing.
I primarily am doing YouTube videos,
but I'm also doing certain things for clients
and it requires less power
than you might actually imagine.
That's not to say that this isn't a powerful laptop.
It's using i5 Intel processors
and they are from the latest generation
as of the making of this video.
It does also have eight gigs of RAM.
These are usually my base requirements
for a video editing laptop or for a Photoshop machine.
A lot of people like to assume
that you need a high-end GPU like you might for gaming
and that that's actually going to be
what you need for video editing.
While there are things and advantages
you can take into consideration
where a GPU is concerned,
it's not absolutely necessary.
I know that a lot of the gearheads
and a lot of the tech geeks
are going to disagree with me on this,
but the reality is that I've created
and done over 600 YouTube videos,
so I think I do know what I'm talking about
when it comes to this.
I'll also preface this by saying that
the entry level MacBook Pros,
the ones that you pay $1500 for,
still actually have an onboard video card
instead of a dedicated GPU from Nvidia.
You have to pay over maybe $1700 to $2000
for that version of the MacBook Pro.
So if the latest Intel onboard graphics card
are good enough for a Mac,
something that you know people are doing
Photoshop and After Effects and video editing with,
then I can use that on a cheaper machine
in the Windows PC side as well,
and get the results that I need.
Bear in mind that even though
I had to do pre-rendering to the timeline,
I also was able to edit 4K video
from the Sony a7R II
using this laptop at a budget price.
So before you go out and think
you have to spend over $1000 on a laptop,
I'm here to tell you that that's not the case.
I have recommendations for different laptops
at different budgets in the description below,
so make sure you're checking out
those Amazon links.
Those help me out and they help you out at the same price.
I will have some upcoming videos for best laptops
and also for budget laptops for video editing.
Those videos will be releasing soon,
so make sure you're subscribed and checking those out,
but lets talk some more about specs here.
One of the things that I will say
is you should look for a fast hard drive.
We talked about processors.
I recommend getting an i7 if you can afford it
or an i5 processor.
I would not go to a i3 processor
unless you're doing very basic,
minimal YouTube videos,
and you never are going to do anything beyond that.
You can get away with that on a budget
if that's all you're doing and there's very light editing.
That's fine.
You can actually get away with some basic photo editing
and Photoshop work with that as well,
but I recommend the i5 to i7
and that's what I'm comfortable with.
For hard drives, a normal laptop like this
comes with a basic hard drive
that does 5400 Rotations Per Minute: RPM.
That's something that's technical
and it's about the spinning hard drive stuff.
Look, if you're watching this video,
you're probably either very knowledgeable about that
or you don't really care to know the technical details.
What I will say is there are better,
faster hard drives called flash hard drives or SSDs,
and you can get those.
They're a little more expensive.
My preference is to go ahead
and buy something that doesn't have them
and then just to swap it out,
or to swap out the DVD drive
for a second hard drive that is an SSD.
This is probably going to cost you $80 to $120
and you can do it yourself.
Watch a YouTube video on it,
have a friend do it,
it's not that difficult.
You can go ahead and you can have that upgrade.
Having a second hard drive is going to be
really great for you for video editing
for a lot of reasons that I'll talk about in a minute.
Having both of your hard drives,
or at least one of them be an SSD
is going to mean that the hard drive is faster
and if you drop the laptop,
it's less likely to do any damage
or corrupt your files or do anything
because it doesn't have any moving parts.
It basically is a giant version of this flash thumbdrive.
So just keep that in mind.
Having those faster hard drives
means that you're going to be able
to read and write the video editing files a lot quicker,
which means that importing
and going through all of your footage,
that's going to be super quick.
Playing it back, that's going to be better and smoother.
A GPU, a graphics card, does help with that as well.
It also helps with when you're exporting the videos
a little bit depending on what software you're using,
such as the Adobe software can take advantage of that,
and will get you those faster render times,
but again, you don't have to have that.
But you should have the fastest hard drive you can have
and the fastest processor you can have,
and as much RAM as possible.
On the RAM side,
eight gigs is the minimum that I'm comfortable with.
You could get away with six.
I wouldn't go down to four.
But eight is a good sweet spot if that's all you can afford
or if that's the maximum that a budget laptop can take,
but if you can upgrade to 16
or buy something with 16 outright,
that is for the best.
If you can get a much more robust
Windows laptop like maybe something
in the higher end from Asus,
you might be able to get a laptop that has 32 gigs of RAM,
and that's tremendous.
If you plan to do advanced animation,
if you're planning to do Adobe After Effects work,
then I would recommend 16 to 32 gigs of RAM,
and a GPU graphics card, preferably Nvidia,
and if you can get a two gig dedicated graphics card,
that's probably going to be very good for you.
A gaming rig is ideal if you're planning
to do After Effects work, advanced color grading,
or work with 4K footage.
That's the direction that I would head in.
These laptops are going to cost you
anywhere from $1000 to $3000.
They're not going to be super cheap.
The brands that I recommend for that
are Asus, Lenovo, and of course,
the Apple MacBook Pro.
There are some other great laptop solutions out there.
The new Microsoft Surface book is one of them.
I would say that it's not quite there yet
in the 13 inch model,
for 4K videos as far as I'm concerned,
based on the specs and based on reviews,
but I will say that future versions of this laptop,
particularly if they release a 15 inch
that has the quad core i7 processors,
probably is going to be competitive
with the Mac on that level.
While the MacBook Pro
is a lot of people's go-to
and I have used them before for these,
you see that me and John Covington
reviewed one here on the channel a while back,
I will say that a good Windows laptop
with the Windows 10 experience
can be competitive with them.
Most of the things that you're going to do
if you're someone who's in creative services,
a designer or video editor,
you're gonna be living in your application,
you're gonna be living in Adobe anyway,
so you're not even going to really see the operating system.
So that argument and the user experience thing,
I don't care.
I use both and I'm fine
and neither one bothers me more than the other.
It's not really that serious.
Fanboys and fangirls turn this into a war.
It's unnecessary, just do the work.
No one really cares what brushes Picasso used, right?
With that being said, the hardware,
the actual specs do matter,
and we already qualified what those are.
The fastest processors you can get,
as much RAM as you can get,
the fastest hard drive that you can get.
In terms of storage space on those hard drives,
I'm going to recommend that you
try and go 512 as a minimum.
I know a lot of laptops sell,
especially if they're using SSD drives
or flash-based storage with 128, 256.
You really want 112 if you're doing video editing
if you can't go higher and go to the terabyte range.
If you have to go cheaper,
then make sure you're storing the bulk of your files
on an external hard drive.
When I'm video editing on the go,
I actually like to use the
Western Digital My Passport Ultra.
I also use the Western Digital My Book
for stuff that I'm doing here on the iMac
and I back up things with the Western Digital My Cloud.
I also have some Seagate solutions
recommended in the description as well
and I also use those,
including my Seagate Personal Cloud.
For a video editing laptop,
something that gets overlooked is screen resolution.
It's overlooked, but it's also overplayed.
Look, I like having a full HD screen
as much as the next person,
but it's not always necessary.
You also have to take into consideration
that the people watching your content
may not be viewing it on a full HD screen.
They might be viewing it on a laptop
or a mobile device or a smaller screen,
so it's more about the resolution that works for you,
what you can afford,
and also what's good on your eyes.
I like editing a lot of my videos here on the iMac
because of how it affects my eyes,
but I've also found that this Asus laptop
has a decent screen for me
and for what my capabilities are,
and this also means I don't always
have to wear my glasses to do my editing,
and that's something that I have a preference for,
so just kind of keep that in mind.
You might want to consider also getting
an external monitor that can handle 4K video.
This way, when you hook up an external monitor,
you have the option to view in 4K video
if that's something that interests you
or if you want to actually do
a 4K video editing workflow.
That's what I would recommend
so that you can actually see the playback
in the way that your audience is going to see it.
One of the reasons that people prefer MacBook Pros
is they talk about the color accuracy.
I found that the color accuracy
is a matter of color calibration,
and that whether you're using a Mac or a PC,
they should color calibrate regardless,
and for that I recommend using
any of the color calibrators from X-Rite,
such as the ColorMunki Display,
or even the ColorMunki Smile.
I have links to these in the description below as well.
Using these color calibrators means
that you're going to get accurate color
regardless of what machine you're using
and that's something that's super important
and you shouldn't take for granted
that your Mac may not be correctly color calibrated,
especially if you bought it used or refurbished,
so just kind of keep those things in mind
and don't take for granted that one thing
is supposedly better than the other.
Do what's necessary,
buy the right components, hardware, and accessories
to make the best use of whatever
is available at the time to work with.
So let's do a quick recap.
Regardless of what your budget is,
you need to keep a couple of things in mind
when buying your video editing laptop.
You need to go ahead and make sure
that it has the fastest processors that it possibly can.
We're going to look at i5s and i7s.
As long as they are over two gigahertz,
you should be fine if you want
to get into the technical speeds that they should be.
Get the highest speed that you can afford.
In terms of RAM, our sweet spot is eight gigabytes.
If we can get 16, that's what we absolutely want to do.
We want 16 gigs of RAM, 32 if we can afford it,
and that's going to help us a lot with processing our files.
Editing, rendering, playback,
everything's going to move quicker and faster
based on the RAM.
In terms of rendering, RAM and CPU
are the two most important things,
not your video card.
Video card helps with smooth playback
and great display capabilities,
and it can help make rendering a little faster,
but ultimately it is not going to be
the dealbreaker when it comes to rendering.
Depending on how much GPU you have to leverage,
maybe your editing goes tremendously faster,
but what a lot of people take for granted
is that if they have an expensive GPU,
they also probably have a lot of RAM
and a very expensive
CPU Intel processor to begin with,
so it's more of that than just the video card
by itself making the difference.
So, keep that in mind.
Remember, the entry level MacBook Pros
do not have a dedicated video card.
They're using the onboard
Intel graphics processors as well,
so just bear that in mind.
If it's good enough for Mac,
it's probably good enough for
whatever system that you're using.
Get fast hard drives.
If you can get SSD hard drives,
that's probably for the best.
If you have a internal hard drive that's not that fast,
consider upgrading it or adding a secondary hard drive.
Take advantage of two hard drives
to make your editing workflow faster
by using one as a media cache
if your software allows for that.
You could also do this with external drives
just depending on what your situation is.
If possible, get a full keyboard
so that you can take advantage
of the arrow keys and of shortcuts
and number keys and things like that whenever possible,
and also make sure that you're getting
at least a 13 to 15 inch laptop
so that you have a better screen with more space
for an editing workflow and hopefully HD capabilities.
It doesn't have to be full HD,
but that can help sometimes with your eye situation
or you may just be more comfortable with that.
One of the other things I didn't bring up earlier
is that the higher-end laptops
also tend to have a longer battery life.
This can be important if you're working on the go
and don't have access to a power outlet,
so keep this in mind that budgets do have their drawbacks.
Budget laptops like this might only last you
two to four hours depending on your situation
whereas if you have something a little bit more robust,
you might get twice as long of the worklife out of it.
So just keep those things in mind.
Well, I hope that helped you figure out
what you need to know in order to buy
a video editing laptop.
If you have questions, leave those in the comments section.
I'll try and answer as many of them as I can.
Remember, links to Amazon,
suggestions for my video editing laptop
and other ones that I would recommend
are in the description,
so go ahead and use those Amazon affiliate links.
You don't pay anything extra,
you help out the channel a little bit
and show your support
and you now know what to buy.
Anyway, like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome content on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching
and geeking out with me over video editing laptops.