Newbie with Video Editing Question - Computer specs

im in the market for a new laptop for under $1000 and there have been a slew of Dell i7 deals running around but im wondering if im going to be editing video, whats the most important spec i should be looking at? is it video card, cpu, or ram? Because sometimes these dell configs are not customizable and i want the best system for just video editing and LR3 thats it...i dont game or anything related to it...just internet and my photo/video editing....thanks!

i5 or i7 with 8gb of RAM and a basic video card should do pretty well.

And if you'll be working at home at your desk with your laptop and you're willing to be hooked up to an external hard drive, get an SSD drive for the laptop itself.

Hmm I havnt thot of that...so I can technically pull the 500GB hard drive out, slap it into a external hd case and then throw in a ssd into the lappy? I guess that would give me some really good boot times and program load times...would it speed up batch processing and video editing conversion times?

What are you going to use for video editing? Video editing can be one of the most taxing things you can do on a computer. If you're just going to use something like Movie Maker, no worries, an i5 or i7 will be more than adequate. If you're going to use Premiere, After Effects or Avid... Well, you're going to spend a good amount of time waiting for renders. Gaming actually is less stressful than some Premiere + After Effects projects

You want to work with as many threads as possible. The more cores you have the less time it will take to render scenes. Especially f you use mixed content (like mixing different video source types). The more RAM you have the more material can be used simultaneously without having to swap back to the hard drive. Your video card should not share memory with the system. If you're going to work with 3D (After Effects & Premier use 3D elements), then you'll need at least a moderate class video card from nVidia or ATI. The hard drive should be quick and as big as you can afford.

Video editing is a desktop's job really. Laptops should only be used to fill in the gaps or work on small projects. Even my i7 MBP with 8GB of RAM and nVidia 330M really struggles sometimes to push out video. At home I network my daughters iMac and at work my Mac Pro via QMaster so I don't have to wait 2 hours to render fifteen minutes of 1080p video.

If that's all you can afford right now, you could reduce the stress on your laptop by converting any video, stills and 3D to 720p or lower. Just doing that will cut render times in half. Just remember, get the best CPU you can afford, then video. The hard drive and RAM can be upgraded later when you have more money. With laptops, upgrading the CPU and video will be far more difficult, if not impossible.

Hope that helps.

eg6turbo wrote in post #11049440
Hmm I havnt thot of that...so I can technically pull the 500GB hard drive out, slap it into a external hd case and then throw in a ssd into the lappy? I guess that would give me some really good boot times and program load times...would it speed up batch processing and video editing conversion times?

Any speed increase you see with and internal SSD will be lost with having to deal with an external drive. Unless your new laptop sports eSATA. SSD will also directly take a chunk out of your budget. CPU and a moderate video card will benefit you far more.

An SSD would help reduce heat, power consumption, and increase battery life when you decide to use it unplugged. But it's expensive, and has very low capacities. You should only use them mainly for the OS and programs, and not to store

So it would not work well if you plan to edit large files on the go. But if you mainly use your laptop at home, plugged in, then you definitely should have an external HDD - and yes, you could take that 500gb out and put it in an external hd case - or you can plug it into a USB or eSata dock (if you have an eSata port on your laptop - eSata would be faster than USB 2.0).