New laptop But what is most important

New laptop But what is most important

Author
Discussion

RemaL

Original Poster:

24,967 posts

233 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
for video editing? a good CPU or Ram or Both ?

been looking at

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/MSI_GE70_2PE_Apache...

http://www.chillblast.com/Chillblast-photo-oc-mobi...

any suggestions on whats best to look for? I'm going from a 5-6YO Desktop running Windows 8.1 AMD Phenom 2 x4 955 processor and 8 gig ram

really want something that's quicker for uploading and transferring video from memory's cars and editing family holidays and Go Pro vid from trackdays and days out etc..
plus the internet surfing. poss a few games

BlueMR2

8,642 posts

201 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
An SSD would make drive transfers much faster, allowing the processor to reach it's potential.

I think alot of production machines tend to be stuffed with ram, but really you need to look at the software you will be using to work out if it receives a benefit from a gpu or not etc before you decide on the laptop.

dudleybloke

19,717 posts

185 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
cpu and gpu are what counts.
everything else can be upgraded.

Funk

26,254 posts

208 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
BlueMR2 said:
An SSD
This.

JRewing

17,540 posts

178 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
Remember that if you buy a machine with a hard drive, you can always upgrade to SSD and keep the old hard drive as an external drive.

RobDickinson

31,343 posts

253 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
If you want fast but poor encoding of video then the GPU may be worth a look but IMO the intel HD graphics have the best fast encoding. But hardware accelerated encoding is frankly crap.

So for normal video encoding go for CPU because the GPU wont be used much. Memory is good but 8gb should be enough.

SSD will be fine but you will be CPU bound for proper video work so having an SSD wont speed that up as such.

mikef

4,820 posts

250 months

Sunday 20th April 2014
quotequote all
For video editing?

Processor power matters, i7 recommended

I'd suggest a minimum of 8GB 1600 MHz RAM or as it's cheap now 16GB+ especially if you are applying multiple video effects

The more screen real estate the better, full HD 1920x1280 display is a minimum and you'll probably want an external HD monitor to display comps and renders

SSDs are great, but HD video takes a lot of disk space. I edit HD in HDV format which stores about 4 mins per GB, other codecs will vary. You need space for raw footage (usually a lot of that), scratch space and to save your edited video. If you're editing HD video I would be aiming for 1TB of disk space which these days is just about affordable with SSD - but that means you will almost certainly need to go to a custom builder like PCSpecialist.co.uk

RemaL

Original Poster:

24,967 posts

233 months

Monday 21st April 2014
quotequote all
great feedback. I was looking at a small SSD say 240GB and a 1TB or there abouts HD? worth going for this.

mikef

4,820 posts

250 months

Monday 21st April 2014
quotequote all
Yes, if your choice of laptop supports either two SATA disks or one disk and an mSata SSD (or best of all, two disks plus an mSata SSD, which makes for great scratch space)

You can set aside space on the SSD for the project you are working on and move completed projects onto the HD. Source video assets are best archived on external storage or even optical media once you've finished editing a project

RemaL

Original Poster:

24,967 posts

233 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
thanks for that

thought on MSi as a maker? anyone had one?

narrowed it down to the MSI GS70 Stealth I hope

ZesPak

24,420 posts

195 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
Funk said:
BlueMR2 said:
An SSD
This.
Can't stress this enough.

RobDickinson

31,343 posts

253 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
ZesPak said:
Funk said:
BlueMR2 said:
An SSD
This.
Can't stress this enough.
For the purpose of video editing it wont make a huge difference and are expensive in the size required... But if you have the money go for it.

bitchstewie

50,763 posts

209 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
Hard drive will make a massive difference. Look at any forum where people are speccing up storage for video editing and you'll see that getting enough throughput can be a [b]massive[b] problem - no point having a screaming CPU and video card if your hard drive can't provide enough reads or writes to service it.

Funk

26,254 posts

208 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
RemaL said:
thanks for that

thought on MSi as a maker? anyone had one?

narrowed it down to the MSI GS70 Stealth I hope
I supplied one to a customer a while back - his request - and it's been back to MSI under warranty for repair. Not indicative of all MSI devices though, but I've not had any others (HP/Dell/Lenovo) with any issues at all, despite supplying more of them than anything else.

To be fair to MSI, they repaired it under warranty but were a bit slow to do so (3 weeks).

annodomini2

6,860 posts

250 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
For video editing, a decent screen!

Then it's basically whatever is in your budget.

clonmult

10,529 posts

208 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
RobDickinson said:
If you want fast but poor encoding of video then the GPU may be worth a look but IMO the intel HD graphics have the best fast encoding. But hardware accelerated encoding is frankly crap.

So for normal video encoding go for CPU because the GPU wont be used much. Memory is good but 8gb should be enough.

SSD will be fine but you will be CPU bound for proper video work so having an SSD wont speed that up as such.
Surely that depends on the GPU and the software being used? iirc, Sony Vegas that a friend used supported Nvidia CUDA, and when he moved to a laptop with a decent GPU it made a fair difference in encoding times.

Having dual drives would be useful - boot drive and applications running on the SSD, and then have the secondary drive for storage. Not sure many laptops support multiple drives.

SwissJonese

1,393 posts

174 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
I've found memory doesn't seem that important for video editing as most PCs/Laptops have decent RAM anyway. CPU makes a difference but I agree with other people that HD is the biggest improvement I've found. I've got an SSD laptop with a portable 1TB USB3 hard drive. So the OS is running uber fast and then processing directly to the USB3 HD. However take a look and see if you can get a thunderbolt 2 port as these run up to 10/20Gbps and double the power of USB3 at insane speed external Hard Drives.

ZesPak

24,420 posts

195 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
SwissJonese said:
I've found memory doesn't seem that important for video editing as most PCs/Laptops have decent RAM anyway. CPU makes a difference but I agree with other people that HD is the biggest improvement I've found. I've got an SSD laptop with a portable 1TB USB3 hard drive. So the OS is running uber fast and then processing directly to the USB3 HD. However take a look and see if you can get a thunderbolt 2 port as these run up to 10/20Gbps and double the power of USB3 at insane speed external Hard Drives.
Having used both I can honestly say that thunderbolt 2 isn't worth the extra money over USB 3 when using just one external HDD. There will be no applicable difference in transfer speed tbh, but the price will skyrocket.

RobDickinson

31,343 posts

253 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
clonmult said:
RobDickinson said:
If you want fast but poor encoding of video then the GPU may be worth a look but IMO the intel HD graphics have the best fast encoding. But hardware accelerated encoding is frankly crap.

So for normal video encoding go for CPU because the GPU wont be used much. Memory is good but 8gb should be enough.

SSD will be fine but you will be CPU bound for proper video work so having an SSD wont speed that up as such.
Surely that depends on the GPU and the software being used? iirc, Sony Vegas that a friend used supported Nvidia CUDA, and when he moved to a laptop with a decent GPU it made a fair difference in encoding times.

Having dual drives would be useful - boot drive and applications running on the SSD, and then have the secondary drive for storage. Not sure many laptops support multiple drives.
Depends on the required output but gpu assisted encoding us fast but very dirty, the results are ok for watching on a phone or something.

wombleh

1,777 posts

121 months

Tuesday 22nd April 2014
quotequote all
Hybrid drive might be good for this use. Small ssd to cache the regularly used sectors like those containing the OS and big spinning platters to hold the video images.