Laptop advice. For Editing. Lightroom, premier pro.

lazysuperhero · 20 Dec 2013 at 22:21

Hey guys. Need advice with buying a light laptop that will be used for editing pictures and video. As well as the usual browsing, word processing etc. (It won't be my main editing machine)

Look at the Macbook Air and Macbook pro and as attractive as they are i am not sure i can afford them.

Then after some research on here i found a Sony Vaio Pro 13. Found a deal on a lightly used/ ex display one somewhere on the interwebs (i7 4500U 1.8GHz Processor, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD) all for about £800

At that price it's too good to miss right? should i go for that or keep looking for something better for the price?

cheers

M3G4UK · 20 Dec 2013 at 23:17

Might be worth looking into a laptop with half decent dedicated graphics or ones with AMD FirePro/Nvidia Quadro as they usually have algorithms that After Effects and Premiere Pro can use to cut rendering time (CUDA etc)

lazysuperhero · 22 Dec 2013 at 13:11

M3G4UK said:
Might be worth looking into a laptop with half decent dedicated graphics or ones with AMD FirePro/Nvidia Quadro as they usually have algorithms that After Effects and Premiere Pro can use to cut rendering time (CUDA etc)

Just curious. Why are dedicated graphics needed to run application for whom processing speed and multi threading etc are more important. Is it only to do with rendering time?

Does what you mentioned affect lightroom?

Had a look around the place and sadly, portability with the specs i need (decent i7 processor, 8gb RAM minimum and ultraportability) i enter £1200+ and i can barely afford the £1000 mark.

It seems i'd have to go for the Gigabyte P35K in order to get what i need whilst not becoming poor and destitute!

cheers

roughavoc · 22 Dec 2013 at 23:35

As you said you need super portability, I would also go for the P35k. The dedicated GPU will help alongside the i7, though I recon I might get a bit toasty when rendering and such

Thorburn · 26 Dec 2013 at 20:08

lazysuperhero said:
Does what you mentioned affect lightroom?

No, in fact Lightroom is a very CPU intensive application.

Lots of people think its like Photoshop in that it works on a pixel level and eats up memory, but in fact Lightroom generates a set of instructions and then works through these from the original source image through to the end product each time you make a change or reload a previously edited image. The more instructions you layer up, the more CPU bound its performance becomes.

Personally for applications like this or Premiere Pro I'd look away from Ultrabooks and towards more powerful and less portable laptops, they are less convenient to carry around but FAR nicer to work with.