How to Choose Best Laptop for Video Editing

As a beginner, choosing the right and best laptop for video editing is not an easy task. This article will try to sort out some best laptops for video editors that are under $1500. And how much money should you spend on what?

After researching hundreds of articles and videos by experts in this field, here’s our list:

General Requirements

Minimum 4 GB RAM (Maximum 16 GB) Processor i7 (minimum Core i5 recommended) Minimum 1 TB Hard Drive (HDD) or 256GB Solid State Drive (SSD). More than this should be preferred Connectivity at least 2 USB 3.0 ports Display 15″ inch monitor with 1080p resolution Operating System Windows 7/8/10 (64-Bit)

If you’re planning to buy laptop for video editing, then it’s important that you choose the right kind of laptop. The following tips will help you:

1. Things to Remember While Buying a Laptop for Video Editing

CPU (Processor)

As mentioned earlier, laptops with i7 series processors and more than 8 GB RAM are perfect for video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas. Within this price range, quad core CPUs should be preferred as they tend to handle powerful software better than dual core CPUs.

With Intel’s Turbo boost technology, many laptops with Core i5 CPUs can often perform as well as laptops with Core i7 processors.

Clock Speed

Make sure the native clock speed of the processor is at least 2.5 GHz or higher, otherwise it will slow down your laptop considerably while rendering video for video editing.

GPU (Graphics Card)

Even though GPU is not of major concern while buying a laptop for video editing, still, make sure you buy one with the latest graphics card like Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M or higher.

This kind of GPU cards are designed to handle the high definition images and videos. Graphics memory should be 768 MB or more although many laptops come with 1 GB GDDR5 memory nowadays.

RAM (Memory)

For professional level video editing, don’t settle with CPUs having less than 8GB RAM; 12 GB is the perfect choice if you can spend that much amount of money on your laptop because 16 GB RAM is overkill for just video editing.

Hard Drive

The hard drive should be of 7200 RPM and you can choose either a standard platter-based one or the solid state drives (SSD) as both of them are equally capable of handling your video data. If you want an affordable option, go with HDD but if you have more money to spend on your laptop, buy an SSD as they load files 5 times faster than normal HDDs.

But if budget is not a problem for you then we would recommend buying laptops with both – SSD and HDD technology in them as that would give best results while performance and storage boost respectively.

Screen

After the graphics card and processor, the screen is the major factor determining the display quality of your video. For watching movies and playing games, a 15 inch or 17-inch monitor is great but for video editing, you should prefer buying a laptop with a 13-14 inch monitor. The brightness of the screen is also important, so check that you can comfortably work with it in bright sunlight too.

OS (Operating System)

Windows 7/8/10 is perfect for running software needed for professional-level video editing. Windows XP or Macintosh are not officially supported by Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 but they still work if you want to try them out instead of using Windows OS on your video editing laptop.

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2. Things to Avoid While Buying a Laptop for Video Editing:

• Don’t buy laptops with glossy displays as they mirror everything when placed under sunlight, which makes them useless for video editing.
• Don’t buy laptops with TN display panels as they are not capable of displaying crisp images like IPS displays do. Unless you’re buying a budget laptop, always prefer IPS over TN panels in your laptop.
• Don’t go for touchscreen displays even if Windows OS supports it because they are not suitable for professional level video editing tasks and only work well when used with apps written for touch screens only.
• Don’t install more than 8 GB RAM on any laptop unless you have no other choice left. With heavy use of graphics cards, the capacity of memory available doesn’t matter much after 6 GB point so just stick to that amount or lower if possible. However, there are 3 GB laptops which are affordable and good for video editing.
• Don’t buy old laptop models just because they are cheaper than brand new ones. Laptop should be of the latest technology so that it can handle high definition images/videos while working with professional level software required for video editing tasks. The latest CPUs, graphics cards, OS versions are must have things while buying a laptop for video editing even if you have to spend more on its purchase price.

3. You are Not a Professional Video Editor… What Should You Look for When Buying a Laptop for Video Editing?

If you’re an average home user who likes to edit his family videos narrated by him or her or record small tutorial videos in your neighborhood field or create short films with friends, then you don’t require buying a laptop having the highest configuration available in the market.

A video editing software package will do just fine for your home-based video editing needs, but the hardware components inside it should be good enough to handle high definition data generated by your camera while recording or importing them into your computer’s memory so that you get smooth playback without any lag due to slow processing speed of your laptop.