Is this laptop capable of HD video editing using Sony Vegas 9.0?

[Scott Francis]

You should be able to do editing on that machine. It doesn’t blow my skirt up in regards to power, and you will need to take more time to render. I do some basic editing on my AMD Turion X2 machine with 4 gig ram and such. Workable but not incredible. Plan on starting a render and going to bed if it is a long video!! Hope this helps!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Al Bergstein]

It should, but you are buying into the low end of an expensive machine, and as such, you might run into problems. I just compared models, was considering Sony but bought Samsung instead. For $899 I got i5 processor, with better graphics card, the eSATA drive slot for external drives, ability to use a variety of card slots for SD and others, 500 GB drive and 4 GBs RAM. Windows 64 should have 4GB RAM as a starting point, 3GB is underpowering the machine which can lead to ‘paging’ to the disk to get enough memory, which is what you need for video editing.

I think you would be better off to start with more RAM now if you can afford it. Do a bit more checking on computers available. Best Buy if you have one locally, is a great resource for a variety of suitable models. Acer, Toshiba, HP and Dell were also sold there, if I remember right. Samsung is making a strong push into this market, and while not the lightest machine, it has the right power configuration. I thought that Toshiba had better speakers, but Samsung’s R580 had decent speakers. HP did not.

The R580 is doing a very reasonable job with Vegas. My desktop is faster, but it’s dual 4 core with 8 GBs RAM.

A desktop is going to be a better deal for editing than a laptop, but for me I needed both for field editing.

Good luck.

Alf