Hey, how's it going. Dave2D here.
So this is the video on what I believe to be the best laptops for content creation.
So your mileage is going to vary.
Everyone's idea of "content creation" is a little bit different, but mine is video editing.
So this is obviously a video that's kind of geared towards video editing.
The other thing is that these laptops are all 14 or 15 inch screens,
and I chose them because I prefer working off of larger screens,
so just to kind of see what I'm doing.
But it's also because you get the quad core processors with these larger devices
and quad core processors are important for me.
So yeah, that's what we're getting: 14 inch or 15 inch laptops with quad core processors.
Let us begin-
Actually, before we go in, I've done individual reviews for each one of these, so if you're interested
I will link the individual reviews below and...
Yeah, first up: XPS 15.
This is the device that I used for most of 2016.
I want to say, like, eighty percent of my videos from last year were done on the XPS 15-
the older version. This is the newer one.
My favorite features: the 4K screen, extremely color accurate, and the thin bezels are nice.
I also like that you can stick 32 gigs of RAM in here, and the battery life is also good.
It's an easy seven or eight hours on this thing.
The things I don't like: the speakers are not very good.
They're in a bad position
And they're small. It also only has three USB ports,
One of them being Thunderbolt 3.
I would occasionally run out of ports when I had a lot of drives and stuff connected to it.
But overall, really good performance, really good device.
Next is the Razer Blade.
This is the Kaby Lake model running a GTX 1060,
it's really similar to the Sky Lake, just a little bit more efficient.
So obviously one of the big advantages of the Razer Blade is the GTX 1060
in a relatively thin and light chassis, and that makes it pretty unique.
But one of the things that I recently started doing was customizing keyboard shortcuts,
so in Premier, I bind things for video editing, like zooming in and out.
Instead of the plus and minus keys or even using the mouse scroll,
I'll bind it to '3' and '4' so I can just do with one hand.
And this isn't just for Premier, you can do this with most applications.
But recently I tried changing the colors of my keys to these shortcuts,
and because it has individual RGB for each key,
I really like it, and when you're done you can switch the profile back to normal.
I don't like that the RAM on this is soldered on. I'd love to get 32 gigs on this,
but I'm stuck at 16 and fan noise can get loud.
The Kaby Lake model runs a little bit quieter than the Sky Lake model,
like the fans don't come on as readily so it's a more efficient chip.
But it's a GTX 1060 in there, when you're doing heavy stuff, fans kick in, it's going to be loud.
Okay, the third thing in this mix is the 2016 Macbook Pro.
I have, like, a love-hate relationship with this thing. It looks awesome,
and pricing has improved quite a bit, because it's now in the Apple refurbished store.
Things I like about it:
I like the build quality. I think it's phenomenal.
Speakers are amazing, I can edit videos right off of these speakers.
Screen is really good. Keyboard is... well...
Everyone's a little bit different. Some people hate it, some people love it.
My personal experience: I like it.
I legitimately like it, but everyone's gonna be different -- some people are just going to hate this thing forever.
That's okay.
The touch bar is whatever. At this point, I think it's a gimmick, I never use it.
I also don't love the port situation, and the graphics chip in here is the Radeon Pro 460.
For the right application,
it's good, like if you're a Final Cut user, it's perfect.
But if you're an Adobe user, and I'm an Adobe user,
it doesn't really perform that well.
And for most people who are on a tighter budget, but really want to get a Mac for content creation,
I would steer them towards the 2015 Model.
You can get some really good pricing on this,
and they're just almost identical in performance to the new model.
In case you're wondering, all these laptops have skins on them.
They're like a marble skin. If you're interested in picking one up, there's a link in the video description.
And none of these are cheap,
and I need to stress the fact that you totally don't need equipment like this to make really good content.
Like these are expensive, but the way, I see it is this: if you can get equipment that speeds up your workflow --
Just makes the whole content creation process that much better.
One of the reasons why these are so expensive, aside from being thin and light machines,
is because the screens are really good quality, they're color accurate and bright,
and the Razor Blade has an updated 4K panel that's coming out soon.
Okay, I want to briefly talk about performance.
Last year, most of my content was shot on a 4K camera called the Panasonic GH4.
This year, most of my stuff is shot on a 5K camera called the Scarlet-W.
Now in general, it's just bigger files, higher resolution files,
so editing that stuff takes a little more horsepower.
The GTX 1060 on the Razer Blade doesn't make a huge difference for 4K content, over the 1050.
But when you go to higher resolution files,
the difference is more noticeable.
The biggest difference though comes from switching from Nvidia graphics
to the AMD graphics, which you find on MacBooks.
Adobe Premiere performs much better on Nvidia chips, because of the CUDA cores.
AMD chips, like the ones in current MacBooks, use OpenCL or metal to render.
The short of it is this: if you use Adobe Premiere you're going to get way better performance with Nvidia chips.
But if you use Final Cut, those AMD chips are great.
Now, I use Adobe premiere but the only reason why I use it is because that's just what I learned on.
Any of the editing programs are great.
If you look at the render times, like, some people will really fixate on this and think that
Final Cut is the better program because it renders faster.
It does, but really, when you make a video, some of these are like 20-hour jobs,
who cares if we wait an extra five or ten minutes. It's really not a big deal.
Any one of the editing programs are great including the ones that I've never even heard of or used.
If they exist on the market, you can make YouTube videos really well with them.
Okay, I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it!
See you guys next time.