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Laptop Specs For Beginner to Intermediate Editor
Hey,
I’m a young college aged filmaker looking to find a solid laptop for Adobe Premiere (and After Effects to a lesser extent). I’m looking to do fairly simple editing for short films, rendering some long nature footage, and relatively short features. All I’ll be using will probably be simple cuts, simple layers (mic audio, video, text, music) and MAYBE some very simple effects from AE. Basically I’m trying to practice filmaking as much as I can without breaking the bank.
I tried to peruse the Adobe forums, and all the posters seem to think that I need professional grade specs or nothing at all. So I decided to ask here.
Basically what specs do I need given what I’m trying to do? I’ve been saving and my budget is around 600-1000 (if I can go lower I’d love that too, but I don’t know if that’s possible.)
I can seem to find almost all necessary specs: i7, nVidia graphics, 8-16gb RAM, 1920×1200 resolution, and 15.6+ screen size, but I can’t seem to find too many with 7200 rpm HDs. I have a 7200 rpm 500gb external HD, but its an older Seagate Free Agent Pro. I was thinking
I could possibly use this for saving video files and put software on a 5400 rpm laptop hard drive. Would this be okay? Also is there a drastic difference between 8 and 16gb RAM? And I’m also having trouble finding nVidia cards that are on Adobe’s spec page.Beyond that any suggestions as far as laptops go? Also, should I trust refurbished laptops?
These are some of the ones I’ve been looking at…
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1 Reply
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If you are editing HD files it will be difficult to use just the internal 5400 rpm hard drive to edit videos. What you could do (if you are not trying to edit while waiting for your plane at the airport) is, put your video files on an external (or internal with appropriate dock) 7200 rpm, powered hard drive and connect to your laptop with USB 3.0 port. I can edit two streams of HD video (multicam) coming from my hard drive sitting in a USB 3.0 dock, without much ado.
Many NVIDIA mobile and desktop video cards can be added to the list of Adobe’s supported cards for Adobe CS5.5 and above. You can find the instructions online. Here is one: https://www.pointsinfocus.com/learning/digital-darkroom/enable-cuda-in-premier-pro-cs6-without-a-quadro/
An i7 processor and at least 8 GB of ram would make life easier. More ram is better. In my setup as above, I use Aspire V3 772G-9822 laptop with NVIDIA GTX 760M and 12 MB memory and it works very well to edit XDCAM HD files. Now, if you are using AVCHD files, that format takes more muscle power.
Hope that helps.
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