How to Pick the Best Laptop for Video Editing
Gone is the day when you needed a huge PC tower to edit videos. Nowadays powerful laptops that weigh just a few pounds can now handle many of the tasks that video editors used to execute on expensive PC tower equipment in a studio or office. So whether you’re a aspiring film director, film student, or you just want to edit or clean up your vacation videos, you should consider a laptop with robust enough specs for video editing. We hope you find our guide on picking the best laptop for video editing helpful.
PC or laptop manufacturers don’t usually make laptops specifically for video editing like they do for gaming or student users. Therefore you’ll have to pick and choose features that matter the most to you. Here’s what we suggest to look for:
Processors
The most important laptop component for video editors are is the CPU speed and followed right behind the amount and speed of memory. Most video programs take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs, therefore it usually means that the more cores you have, the better performance you get. Some good news is that some of Intel’s mobile Core U-series processors are designed to use less power and now have four cores. Popular video editing software such as Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro are designed to distribute tasks over multiple cores therefore as we stated before the more cores the better. What can get tricky is many manufacturers and retailers don’t always list core counts that can be easily found on the box or website.
Memory
If video editing is the main purpose of the laptop then 16 GB should be the goal. Most laptops on the market right now have a max limit of 16 GB of RAM but you can find some laptops with 32 GB of RAM if you look hard enough. The cost of a 32 GB laptop is pretty enormous so we feel the money would be better spent on a better faster processor.
Hard Drives
As the saying goes your PC/Laptop is only as fast as it’s slowest component. Therefore, you’ll also want a fast hard drive. This means looking for a laptop with an Solid State (SSD) Hard Drive because they can access data much faster than older spinning drives. The speed difference between an SSD and a spinning drive is vast and is usually at last twice as fast as the spinning drives that use platters. You will notice the difference especially on when the computer boots up. Video files are quite usually quite large so it’s ideal to have a hard drive with lots of space. The cost of solid state drives over 512 GB is quite high so there are several things you may do. Some laptops have internal space so you can add an additional Hard drive either a traditional hard drive which is much cheaper and use it for storage, or use the extra slot for an additional solid state drive. Another option would look for a laptop with Thunderbolt connections and buy a Thunderbolt compatible external Hard Drive.
Graphics Card
Most laptops come with a graphics card that’s part of the CPU. This arrangement offers woeful performance if you’re playing richly detailed video games, but it’s actually fine for many video-editing scenarios. As mentioned earlier, nearly all video-editing suites are designed to take advantage of more powerful processors, but graphics acceleration isn’t as common.
Display
The display specs on your laptop could be important, especially if you plan on using your laptop for more advanced video editing tasks like shading and color correction. While full HD resolution (1,920-by-1,080) is usually fine for most video editing tasks, if you shoot primarily in 4K, you will want a screen resolution to match. With many current laptops offering at least full HD (1,920-by-1,080) resolution, your main screen consideration should be size a 15-inch or 17-inch display will let you see both Full HD and 4k resolutions without sacrificing too much weight and size. If weight or size doesn’t matter to you then we suggest getting the biggest screen your budget will allow.
Weight
Many powerful video editing capable laptops weigh less than 3 pounds at this time. This is good news because it lessens your load if you already have to carry camera and lighting equipment. Issue is the thinnest and lightest laptops won’t have discrete GPUs or displays usually larger than 14 inches. You may be able to get past this if you don’t have to do heavy cutting when away from your primary video editing workstation. If you don’t have a more powerful primary workstation then you will want to spend the money on getting the best laptop you can.
Ports
We just mentioned weight for your laptop but if plan on slimming down the size, try not to lose too many ports. We recommend looking for a laptop with at least one Thunderbolt 3 port. The Thunderbolt 3 port allows you connect to external displays via the DisplayPort standard, connect lightning-fast external drives, and connect pretty much any USB peripheral via an adapter. Some laptops, including all MacBook Pro models, only include Thunderbolt 3, which is a bit extreme since the standard is still relatively new. The sweet spot is one or two Thunderbolt ports, and one or two regular USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 ports. Besides that look for a laptop with an SD card slot. SD card slots can be useful for transferring footage directly from your camera to your laptop. In our opinion a comfortable keyboard is a must. Many video editors use keyboard shortcuts to help them streamline many editing tasks, from starting and stopping playback to adding keyframes.
PC vs Mac
The debate of a PC vs Mac has been around since the dawn of personal computing. Video editors or any creative type professional usually do prefer to use Macs. If you already have a preference we are not going to even try to switch you to a PC user. So the following advice is for those on the fence. With a PC compatible laptop you have a vast array of hardware choices over a Mac. Maybe most importantly it’s much easier and cheaper to upgrade your hardware with a PC over Mac. While most video editing software runs on both platforms software such as Final Cut Pro only works on Macs. Also Macs do perform better with PC equivalent specs. Macs have the advantage of having both the software and the hardware being engineered together. Therefore performance is usually better than PC laptops with lesser specs. It usually comes down to cost. You can usually buy a superior PC laptop for the same price or cheaper than a Mac.
Things you might not have to care about
Battery life:
If this laptop is primarily for video editing then length of battery life is not that important in our opinion. We say this because typical resource usage from editing video will typically drain your battery quickly no matter how long the length of life is. It’s usually best to plug in to an outlet when performing editing functions. The better the cpu, memory, screen will also determine your battery’s life length. Usually the better resources you have when doing intense work will drain your battery more.
Touchscreen:
You typically don’t get much use out of a touch screen when video editing. Video editing involves precision and repetition therefore it is best suited to keyboard shortcuts and a mouse, not touch inputs. The one exception is the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. The Macbook Pro Touch bar is a narrow secondary touch-enabled screen perched above the keyboard. It’s designed with apps like Final Cut Pro and the Adobe Creative Suite in mind. Unless you are dependent on the Touch bar or don’t care about costs we don’t recommend choosing an Apple laptop solely for this still-novel interface.
Laptops that double as Tablets:
A video editor will not need a convertible laptop that doubles as a tablet unless they use it also for web browsing and watching videos. This is more of a luxury then a need therefore in our opinion shouldn’t necessarily be used to look for a video editing laptop.
Cost
Now comes the hard part because it’s time to pull out your wallet or purse. We have broken it down into three cost categories Budget, Mid-Tier, High-End. Check out about how much you can expect to spend and some good choices in each of the cost categories.
Budget video editing notebook
To get a laptop that will allow you to do the most basic video editing tasks expect to spend between $600 – $800. If you are low on funds check out our reviews for the best budget laptops for video editing article. Below is good choice for those on a budget and don’t expect to do very serious video editing:
Our suggestion for best budget laptop for video editing:
Dell Inspiron 17-5767 Notebook Laptop
- Simple clean design
- i5-8250U Quad-Core CPU, 8GB of RAM
- 128 GB SDD (solid state Drive), 1 TB HDD
- 17 inch screen at full HD resolution (1920 x 1080)
Mid-Tier video editing notebook
A mid-tier video editing laptop should allow you to perform most video edits. Expect to spend around $900-$1200 for these types of laptops.
Our suggestion for best mid-tier laptop for video editing:
2018 HP Pavilion 15.6 Inch Notebook Laptop Computer
- 8th Generation Quad Core Intel Core i7-8550U CPU, 16 GB RAM
- 512GB SSD (solid state drive)
- 15.6″ diagonal FHD IPS BrightView WLED-backlit display (1920×1080) Display
- Fast USB Type-C ports
High-End video editing notebook
A high-end video editing laptop should allow you to perform all video edits. Although performance will probably be a little bit less than a dedicated workstation PC, but you can probably use a high-end laptop as it’s replacement. Expect to spend anywhere from $1400-$5000 for these types of laptops depending on needs.
Our suggestions PC/Mac for best high-end laptop for video editing:
Apple MacBook Pro 15″ Z0V3 CTO
- 8th-generation Intel 6 Core i9 Coffee Lake processor with Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz , 32 GB RAM
- 512GB SSD (solid state drive)
- Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB Memory
- Touch Bar and Touch ID
HP OMEN 17t Premium High Performance
- 7th-Generation Kaby Lake Intel Quad Core i7-7700HQ , 32 GB RAM
- 4TB SSD (solid state drive)
- AMD Radeon RX 580 Graphics with 8GB Memory
- 17.3″l FHD IPS anti-glare WLED-backlit (1920 x 1080) with AMD FreeSync technology,