Best PC Laptop for Video Editing? - 7 Video Editing Laptop Tips & Specs | Blog Universes

Best PC Laptop for Video Editing? - 7 Video Editing Laptop Tips & Specs

So, what is the best PC laptop for video editing? With so many laptops to choose from in this Blog I'm gonna talk about the new laptop that I recently got, plus my seven biggest tips to think about when picking out a laptop comin' up. Hey what's up guys, Shashank here with Blog Universes, helping you go further, faster in media. And on this channel we do tech gear reviews and video gear reviews. And hey, at any point during the Blog check out show notes and links in the description below. I'll link everything up as far as the laptop that I'm using, plus the tips and anything else I forgot. Let's jump into the Blog. So, I recently picked up this HP Pavilion. It's a 17.3 inch laptop, so it's pretty large and it's ultra HD 4K and I've been surprised, 'cause I wouldn't be thinking that HP, you know, is really in the game as far as, you know, video editing, graphic design, but this laptop has been crushing it. 

But no matter what laptop you check out, here's my seven biggest tips for what to look for in a video editing laptop, especially if you wanna start editing things like 4K footage and doing After Effects and things like that. Tip number one is your display. Now I've been kind of tricked by this in the past. Sometimes, even if you have a large screen, like this is 17 inches, it doesn't mean that the resolution of the display will support, say 4K editing. You know, if you only need to do HD you don't necessarily need a 4K display, but in this case this display is 3,840 pixels by 2,160. So, you get that full 4K display, it's anti-glare. And another thing to look for is IPS, which means in panel switching, but essentially what that means is color accuracy. 

You know as a video editor or a graphic designer, you want your monitor to be color accurate so that when you're editing or color grading or doing things, you know if you don't see it right, it's not gonna end up right on the other end when you export whatever content you're producing. So, when you're picking out a laptop, definitely get one that has a screen size and resolution that will support video editing that you wanna do and then look for IPS, 'cause you want your colors to be accurate. 

Tip number two is a processor. When it comes to video editing the processor is very important and basically you want a processor that's as fast as possible and one thing that'll really help video editing is the more cores the better, right? You have dual core, quad core, now there's hexa core. And so if you can get more cores, that's gonna speed up editing, and is definitely gonna help 4K. And so this particular one is an I7 6,700 HQ quad core processor and so it's 2.6 GHz to to 3.5 GHz. And from real world testing, whether editing HD or 4K, this processor has been crushing it, but again when it comes to processor speed is good. Tip number three is the graphics card. And so for me I personally always look for NVIDIA graphics cards. This one is a GTX 960 M, 4GB with GDDR 5 RAM in the graphics card. And so the important thing here is I edit on Adobe Premiere Pro, which has what's called the Mercury Playback Engine. This came out a few years ago and what it allowed was that in the past video editing was actually all done on the processor and actually not the video card. 

Kinda sounds weird, but once they added Mercury Playback Engine, the video card started doing some of the heavy lifting for editing as well. And so when you go into your Premiere settings, you could see just software acceleration for video editing or you could see GPU acceleration for video editing, meaning that you've got the right kind of video card that works with Premiere that allows you to speed up your editing, speed up rendering, real time rendering, and just really enhances video editing performance. And so NVIDIA is kinda the best there. There are a couple other workflows that work, but I always look for NVIDIA. 

And what you're also looking for is CUDA cores. The more CUDA cores the better. And so you can look at how many CUDA cores each graphics card has, but in this particular case, I'm generally looking for a very solid graphics card that is gonna support hardware acceleration. That's the key word you want. You want hardware acceleration when you're video editing and you'll get high performance. Tip number four is your hard drive. And so this particular laptop has the operating system installed on a SSD drive and it's 1TB. And I think if you can get SSD drives, those are a lot faster typically. You know speeds of SSDs varies as well, but the OS is on a 1TB hard drive for this. And then there's a secondary drive and I kind of made a mistake here because I got this laptop from Computer Upgrade Kings, which allows you to sometimes customize some of the specs and I picked out the 2TB drive for extra data storage, but my mistake was this one is 5,400 RPMs, that's how fast the hard drive spins. The 1TB version's 7,200 RPMs, meaning it spins faster. 

That means you're gonna be able to access your data faster, and it does speed up editing. Now the good news is this is still great. I've been able to, again, edit 4K projects, and it is editing quick, sometimes if I stack some clips on top of each other and I add some color grading or whatnot, you get a little bit of lag, it slows down a bit, but nothing that you can't get through as far as editing a project. And the other thing that is important here is Premiere, or whatever video editing software you have installed, is on your SSD, but you want your data files on a separate drive. And so that's why ideally you maybe you're editing off an external hard drive, or in this case I've got an internal hard drive, which is almost always gonna be faster. So, I can move my data files over to that internal hard drive and then edit on the SSD if that makes sense. 

And so a multi-drive workflow speeds up video editing. Actually ideally, you want your software on one hard drive, your media cache files, all the temp files from video editing on another hard drive, and then your data files on another hard drive. And you want all three of those to be as fast as possible, especially if you get into 4K because it's pulling on these large data files, big video files that you're editing. But saying all that in a laptop you're a little bit limited, you're on the road, you're not necessarily gonna have like a three hard drive workflow, and so this is working great, crushing video editing, but definitely consider your hard drive workflow when picking out a laptop. Tip number five is your RAM. And so, I upgraded this laptop to 32GB of RAM and I think it started with 16GB. And so you want really as much as possible at some point for video editing it's not going to take a ton of RAM, you know really, like anything, the need for speed, like the more is better. But RAM is especially important for say After Effects or Cinema 4D, or some of these other things. Having a lot of RAM can really support doing motion graphics projects and whatnot. And so I wanted kind of that buffer and I also just multi-tasking in general. You know RAM is where like the working files are sitting as you're working on projects. And so having as much as possible is good. I wouldn't recommend going below 16GB if you're picking out a laptop for video editing these days and if you can go higher than that, that's even better. Tip number six is all of the additional features that I think are really important to consider when picking up a laptop. And so, one we're talking about PC laptops, USB 3.0. How many USB 3.0 ports do ya have? You know, if you're gonna run an external hard drive you definitely wanna make sure that external hard drive is USB 3.0 and that you also have ports that can support that, so you get the full speed benefit. Even better would be USB Type C, which is the new smaller USB connection that also is even faster. And so, think about your inputs so that you can run peripheral devices, however you say it, and you don't need USB 3.0 to run like a mouse, or to run, you know, some basic things like that, but again if you're gonna be editing on an external hard drive think about those connections. So, this one came with two USB 3.0 ports and then one 2.0 port, which again, I actually do like to use a mouse better than the track pad. So I just plug that in. So, you could plug that into the USB 2.0, run your external hard drives on the 3.0. So, that's important as far as additional features. Another one is it has a full size back lit keyboard. I actually live having a back lit keyboard for editing in the dark or just better visibility on the road, traveling on airplanes, at night they turn the lights off or whatever, just kinda helps being able to work on whatever you're working on. The other thing is, of course, the webcam. This has got a TruView HD webcam and dual array digital microphones. And so I think for Google Live, YouTube Live, Google Hangout, Skype calls with people, you know, maybe that's something you want to be, have high quality on the laptop you're looking for. Of course a multi-media card reader. 

Just for your workflow as soon as you get done shooting, being able to just plug your SD card in and capture that. And, you know, some of these new laptops, I always think, you're only as strong as your weakest link and so sometimes you have a fast SD card, but if the card reader isn't USB 3.0, then the transfer speeds aren't as high. I think on USB 2.0 it's like 40mbs it kinda caps out at, but with USB 3.0 I'm seeing transfer speeds at almost 90mbs. Which is important, right? Everything matters, your downloading SD cards, you're trying to capture footage, and you know, on the field, whatever project you're working on. And so a good card reader... It's got that HDMI input, you know, that's great for presentations. I use this whether I'm speaking seminars, different things like that. And so if I need to connect it up, that's nice to have. And then also the battery life. That's a huge consideration as you're looking for laptops. Look into the battery life. This is a big laptop and the battery life is very impressive. My last video editing laptop had terrible battery life. Like if it wasn't plugged in and you were doing stuff, it was like less than an hour. 

I can get like three hours out of this working on some legitimate projects. And I especially like that. It is a bit bulky to use on a plane, but I've used it plenty of times and if you can't plug in your laptop and charge I want it to last for three. If I turn the brightness down and do some other things, even three, four, five hours. So I can work the entire time, send emails, do whatever I need to do. And so I'm very pleased with a battery laptop, the battery on this laptop. And then tip number seven is of course style, right? I think style matters, you know, you actually wanna like the design, you wanna like the look. This laptop is large, it comes in at six pounds. I actually had a laptop that was bigger and bulkier than this. So, they have kept it pretty slim, pretty nice, and it's not a big deal. I mean, I wanted basically a mobile desktop and so this accomplished that purpose. Overall I really like the styling and the layout and the design of the entire laptop. Alright, and then lastly a few tips, whether you're getting a new laptop or even with your current laptop, is you always wanna update the drivers. I will tell you two funny quirks about this laptop was number one, it had a display flicker issue, where every once in a while the display would kinda flicker on and off, but after I updated the drivers, it was fine. And then the other thing was actually the wifi was very slow ad after I updated the wifi driver, I could start pulling more speed. And the way I noticed was I was like stuff was cruisin' on my phone with our home wifi, but this was like a slug, but once the adapter was updated or driver was updated, it started going fast. And so, if you ever need higher performance out of your gear, firmware updates, driver updates, any kind of updates, could always be a key to really pushing your stuff to the next level. Now, as far as the price goes of this exact laptop, this came in at about $1,400 for me. Like I said, I got it from Computer Upgrade King. And I'll put a link to this in the description below. It's actually better now, it's a newer version, this version is already past, the new one has a faster graphics card. 

And what I love about Computer Upgrade Kings is that they allow you to customize your stuff. You can switch out, I think I did a blu-ray player in here with a blu-ray writer in addition to just the DVD player. And if you want to tweak your RAM and some things like that and if you do wan to grab something off Computer Upgrade Kings, you can use the promo code THiNK Media TV, that'll take 5% off your entire order. This video's not sponsored or anything, but I did email them after buying this laptop and said, hey, I'm gonna be talkin' about it on my channel, can we hook up the THiNK Media TV community if they wanna check anything out from you guys. And so they created that promo code for me. And then I'll also link up to a couple non-customized, you know, fully already built machines from Computer Upgrade King in the description below on Amazon and so that's nice, you can read the reviews about 'em and whatnot. I think this laptop itself is a great buy. I've been pleased with its performance, with its use, and again, it's a little bit more expensive, but I wanted to for sure be able to edit 4K video footage. 

If you don't need to edit 4K, then you don't necessarily need the best performance across the board, you could probably be grabbing a solid video editing laptop in like the $700, $700-$1,000 range. If you wanna do 4K, it's but you know, a little bit more investment. And so I think these seven principles are kinda the framework to look for and then definitely shop around, Amazon, Computer Upgrade King, other places to find the perfect laptop for crushing your projects. Question of the day: What laptop are you currently using to edit video? What specs are you working with? And are you thinking about upgrading soon and what are you looking for? Let me know in the comment section below. So thanks so much for checking out this Blog. Keep crushing it and we will talk soon.