spec me a video editing laptop

seth · 10 Dec 2009 at 16:41

my mate wants a new laptop and im having difficulty finding one that meets his requirements.

firewire
reasonably portable, say 15"
no more than 400 quid
3 gig ram or more

for general video editing purposes

cheers

seth · 14 Dec 2009 at 18:58

no suggestions?

Tilluss · 15 Dec 2009 at 08:19

Your not gonna get much of a video editing laptop for £400 im afraid. Up the budget and you might be in more luck.

siuko · 15 Dec 2009 at 08:28

I think you biggest thing here is what software are you going to use?

For example I have just spec'd some laptops for the school I work at to run Adobe Premier Pro. So I just followed the minimum system requirements and went from there

The one's I've looked at are Dual Core with 4Gb ram at about £1100 (excl vat).

d_brennen · 15 Dec 2009 at 08:35

My mate built an MATX video/audio PC complete with 15" TFT into a flight case. Hardly ultra portable but it only needed one plug and would wipe a £1200 laptop

glenimp617 · 15 Dec 2009 at 09:02

"for general video editing purposes"

You'll be fine, video editing doesn't require a high spec machine at all

If you are doing a lot of editing, cutting and pasting then you might be wise to buy one with an esata port so you can use an external hdd for all the video stuff

Tilluss · 15 Dec 2009 at 10:30

glen8 said:
"for general video editing purposes"

You'll be fine, video editing doesn't require a high spec machine at all

If you are doing a lot of editing, cutting and pasting then you might be wise to buy one with an esata port so you can use an external hdd for all the video stuff

You need quite a good CUP for the rendering unless you want to wait days for something to render.

Laptops from Dell with an i7 are around the £700 mark from what i remember, have a look there.

glenimp617 · 15 Dec 2009 at 15:08

OP didn't mention anything about rendering?

Do you mean encoding, I'd expect video editing these days will be using HD codecs so probably doesn't need to encode from one format to another.

To be honest, when people say 'video editting' they are being a bit vague. Depends on what you are actually doing. Simply importing camcorder footage, cutting pieces out and adding a new transitions are all fair low end spec requirements.

Uncompressed video to HD codec encoding requires a good CPU, adding special effects requires lots of RAM etc etc

jamief · 15 Dec 2009 at 16:20

You'd probably be best buying something used. I just sold an XPS M1530 for <£400 which would've suited you perfectly.

glenimp617 · 15 Dec 2009 at 16:46

jamief said:
You'd probably be best buying something used. I just sold an XPS M1530 for <£400 which would've suited you perfectly.

+1 Nobody wants second hand, even in a recession :rolleyes:

which is why you can pick up some right bargins