Are higher spec machines only important for render, or general use?

[Mike Thomas ii]

here… https://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-15r-se-7520/fs

These use the Radeon HD 7730M 2GB RAM graphics. Sorry, they are right around £600.

[Dave Osbun]

This is just my personal opinion, but if I was going to build/buy a new workstation for video editing, why limit yourself by going with a laptop? A desktop will be cheaper to buy/build and give you more flexibility for upgrading the system in the future. I have yet to see a laptop that has more than 2 slots for RAM, and if the laptop has a separate graphics card (usually only the high-end ones do), it will be the mobile version of a desktop card, which will not be as powerful.

If you need the portability, then a laptop is for you, but for best bang-for-your-buck, desktop workstations are the way to go.

Intel i5 3570K Ivy Bridge 3.40GHz quad core
Asus P8Z77V-LK
16gb RAM
ATI Radeon HD7850 2gb
Crucial M4 SSD + Seagate Barricuda 7200rpm
Windows 7 Pro 64

[Will Kee]

I agree with the above post. I just built a desktop and it’s beast. I’m currently editing a 2:45m music video consisting of 500GB of RAW 5k .r3d files, and although the preview is lagging a bit, you could never do this on a laptop. My system only cost £1000, and if I wanted to update a graphics card, for example (bare in mind footage will become increasingly more laboursome, and these updates might become necessary further down the line), I’m free to do so with a desktop.

Intel i7 3770K 3.5GHz
ASUS® P8Z77-V
16gb 1600MHz RAM
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 650
180GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD + 3 x Samsung SpinPoint F3
Windows 7 64bit

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Thanks for the input guys. I have a perfectly adequate desktop already. My issue is that I have two hours of a commute every day. I want to manage my time better by getting the train and doing some editing on the journey, hence the laptop.

If the raw files are mirrored on both machines, its a simple case of copying over my vegas file and doing the final render on desktop.

I just want to make sure that I can use a laptop adequately for timeline edit work, Even if that means working on a lower preview quality.

With this in mind, is i7 necessary, or would i5 suffice? and on either, is 8gb ram suitable. Also, are dedicated graphics a must?

An extra bonus of a laptop is I could back up card data on shoot location…

[Dave Haynie]

You can edit on either an i7 or an i5, dedicated or separate RAM graphics… it’s all a matter of performance. On a single screen edit at lower than 1080p resolution, you’re not going to worry about much beyond quarter screen preview.

I’d prioritize. Go with at least 8GB RAM. I’ve done editing on my old laptop, which is a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz with 4GB RAM, but it’s far from ideal… I’d definitely go higher spec today, which is completely possible. So I’d have some kind of quad core processor. The difference between i5 and i7 is less on a laptop than on a desktop anyway, because laptop i7s only have two-lane memory, same as the i5. They do support hyperthreading, but that’s not going to be much of an issue for editing (and it’s even questionable for rendering). Some higher end i5s have outperformed lower end i7s on laptops, depending on the specific job.

As for graphics, most nVidia or AMD GPUs can support OpenCL, which can accelerate graphics under Vegas 11 or 12. But the sort you’re usually going to get on a laptop, particularly an affordable laptop, it’s likely to have enough cores to make much of a difference, so I wouldn’t give too much concern for that, unless you can find a good deal on a GPU with enough cores to actually help, looking for 300+ cores on a nVidia, 500+ on an AMD, and of course, separate RAM. The separate RAM makes the system a bit faster, but you’re not really going to be stressing the graphics subsystem with editing, particularly with your video scaled down in a window. A larger GPU will also eat battery much faster, and generate more heat, also a consideration for mobile editing.

SSD is nice for speed and battery life, but I’ve had plenty of projects that alone wouldn’t fit on an SSD. My big HP laptop has dual drives… currently a total of 1.2TB, but if I used it more, I might swap out one for an SSD. But I wouldn’t use it for video alone with just a single SSD of the size that’s going to be affordable. For the laptop I bought my daughter last summer (for college, with lots of video editing in her future), the difference between the 750GB HDD and a 750GB SDD was about $1000 (she got the HDD).

When shopping, pay close attention to the battery life claims, and figure you may wind up closer to the lower end of that if you do lost of previewing in your editing. Make sure you get a system that’s going to comfortably last your commute… and factor in the reality that, in a year, that battery will probably only be at 90% of the original total charge capacity.

-Dave

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Very helpful indeed Dave, Thankyou kindly!

[John Kendrick]

Clive,

Just as a final note – see my thread on “Kepler and Sony Vegas – (Angry Face)”

It appears there are issues with Sony Vegas and nVidia CUDA when you use a 6xx series card – it doesn’t work on Vegas Pro 11 at all and doesn’t properly work on Vegas Pro 12.

If you were going to get an nVidia chip in your laptop, be aware that you might not see the benefits of the GPU processing as much as you might hope.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Thanks for the heads up John!