What laptop should I buy to handle grunty video editing on Premiere

[Ryan Holmes]

Your question is a bit like asking – I wanna go fast what car should I buy?

How much do you want/have to spend? What type of footage do you edit – SD, HD, 2K, 4K? What codec do you use most often – RAW, ProRes, h.264, DNxHD, etc.? Do you prefer a Mac or Windows? Do you want to run other apps besides CS4/CS5? If so, which ones (Avid, FCPX, Smoke, Resolve, etc)? What version of CS4/CS5 do you have – Mac or Windows? I believe there’s still a small fee (shipping costs…maybe more) to cross grade from one system to the other.

All that to say, you’ll need to be more specific about what you want/need if anybody here is gonna be able to help.

My $.02

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Alex Gerulaitis]

2nd what Ryan said.

On the other hand it does help to know your options when shopping. E.g. from modded Toyota Yaris and Miatas through BMW M-cars and MB AMG, and all the way to Bugatti, McLaren, Ferrari, Lambo supercars, etc.

Each segment will likely have its own guide explaining what each car is good for.

In this case, the “car” has to be good for CS purposes, have a suitable graphics chip, and probably shouldn’t cost anything close to a Ferrari. The brand value is on a little smaller scale with laptops, vs. cars – with the exception of Apple of course, up until recently.

Here is a year-old guide that might help narrow down the choices:

https://support.dv411.com/home/vendors/adobe/cs5-laptops

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA