Best Budget Laptop For Video Editing

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Wheelbarrow01

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#304313 23-Apr-2023 01:40

I'm keen to get into shooting and editing content for my YouTube channel. I've done a small number of short low talent videos already which I'm generally ashamed of (lol) however they have been good practice and in the last few weeks I've bought some neat kit which should dramatically improve the quality of content I create - gimbal, proper external microphones (wireless DJI) plus I have the obligatory tripods, lights, a decent drone and a selection of phone & action cameras. I have a few hobbies for which I'll likely be making videos - my Hilux restoration, my racecar project, my 90's HSV Senator, my fishing/boating adventures, travel and mucking about with the dog. I'm not looking to make money or become an influencer, just share knowledge and have some fun with it.

However what I don't have is a laptop powerful enough to perform the editing task, so I'm keen to hear from any other Geekzoners who may already be doing a similar sort of thing.

I am looking to start using DaVinci Resolve, mostly because I have a friend who is a professional editor in the US film industry, and he says almost every film studio uses it, and even the free version is very good. It's been great getting his input and suggestions but I am trying not to bug him with too many questions.

This is what I know: "To build a powerful DaVinci Resolve workstation, your machine will need at least a four-core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a graphics card with 4 GB of VRAM. You also need macOS 11 or Windows 10 or later with the latest drivers installed. Your storage requirements vary depending on your project, but probably a minimum of 512GB SSD storage but external drives can solve for anything more than that".

My friend says while Mac is the gold standard for video editing, a Windows machine will be equally as good for anyone but a Hollywood professional - I don't believe I am quite at that level yet 🤣.

A Macbook (M2) with the specs outlined above retails at just over $3k and while it would be great, I am not sure I can justify spending that much for something that will only be used for editing. That and I haven't used a Mac since the mid '90's.

There are a couple of cheaper options I have been looking at:

This HP gaming laptop which looks to have the right sort of specs but only has a standard HD screen for $1500 (with a bonus $300 Harvey Norman gift card).
This Asus Vivobook Pro laptop with similar sort of specs but with a larger 4k OLED screen which specifically targets content creators, for $2300.

I figure that if I am going to be shooting 4k video, then I should at least get something with a 4k screen to do proper colour grading, or would I perhaps be better to get the cheaper HP laptop and then get a decent sized 4K monitor. It's pretty unlikely I'd ever be editing anywhere other than at home and if anything having two screens would be handy.

Anyway, keen to hear from any other Geekzoners with some experience in setting up for video editing, or anyone with an opinion on machine options.

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Mad Scientist
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#3067151 23-Apr-2023 07:09

an old ipad with a M1 chip, anything with an M1 SOC

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

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mudguard

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#3067153 23-Apr-2023 07:19

Batman:
an old ipad with a M1 chip, anything with an M1 SOC

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

Ah that's interesting, I edit 4K in Premiere on my Dell XPS and yes it will get warm but not badly.
In fact it's the only time the fans will come on, when I render 4K video.

This doesn't help the OP much I'm afraid, I've barely used Macs and played with Resolve briefly. I will say Premiere is not user friendly so Resolve is a good move

MaxineN

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#3067154 23-Apr-2023 07:51

Batman:

an old ipad with a M1 chip, anything with an M1 SOC

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

This issue is a vendor problem.

My HP Elitebook 840 G5 at full tilt won't go above 85C and the fans kick on immediately.

The AMD Ryzen based Vivobook T420 with it's 4700U. Full tilt won't go higher than 80C.

In the many years I've own some Windows laptops never seen this unless the vendor has intentionally made it crappy(looking at you Apple pre ARM transition and your passion to never kick on the fans until those poor Intel processors try and go above 95c).

IMO the HP gaming laptop would be "fine" and heck because you've got the Nvidia GPU you can actually use it to encode/decode HEVC content and it wouldn't actually fall over with effects, transitions. The only thing I'd say is please upgrade it to 32GB RAM as soon as you can. Davinci likes memory. Ask me how I know.

The Vivobook would also be "okay", Okay gets a lesser grade from me simply because the aforementioned Vivobook that I own absolutely hates Windows with a passion and will occasionally BSOD where on Linux it will not fall over. Again Nvidia GPU is a big win here. The display will be a lot better for editing.

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#3067157 23-Apr-2023 08:23

i put some thought into this and I believe the issue is GPU overheating causing bottleneck

if the video editing software does not stress the GPU i believe OP's laptop will work fine

as soon as the GPU gets too the system will throttle and everything will slow to a crawl

photo editing i think doesn't stress GPU, not sure about video

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#3067158 23-Apr-2023 08:25

mudguard:
Batman:

an old ipad with a M1 chip, anything with an M1 SOC

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

Ah that's interesting, I edit 4K in Premiere on my Dell XPS and yes it will get warm but not badly.
In fact it's the only time the fans will come on, when I render 4K video.

This doesn't help the OP much I'm afraid, I've barely used Macs and played with Resolve briefly. I will say Premiere is not user friendly so Resolve is a good move

that's good to know!

i guessing yours isn't the stupid fast 8 core that doesn't have anywhere to dump heat?

i got it for the OLED screen. but now I use the M1 Mac 14 most of the time as it's just superior in every way except when the software requires windows!

gbwelly

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#3067208 23-Apr-2023 08:44

Any reason why it has to be a laptop and not a desktop? Desktop makes it cheaper and easier to get features like nvenc, and you can spread out your work with a significantly larger screen.

mudguard

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#3067438 23-Apr-2023 21:10

Batman:

that's good to know!

i guessing yours isn't the stupid fast 8 core that doesn't have anywhere to dump heat?

i got it for the OLED screen. but now I use the M1 Mac 14 most of the time as it's just superior in every way except when the software requires windows!

I had no idea how many cores so had to look at the invoice. Four. It's also five years old, second battery, second fan and it travels every week so I can't complain. Didn't need the touch screen but it was the only way to get 4K

Wheelbarrow01

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#3067441 23-Apr-2023 21:46

gbwelly:

Any reason why it has to be a laptop and not a desktop? Desktop makes it cheaper and easier to get features like nvenc, and you can spread out your work with a significantly larger screen.

A couple of reasons - firstly, I don't have a dedicated room to do my thing in, so will most likely need to move around a bit eg lounge, dining room table, workshop bench etc. Secondly, it would be nice to have the freedom to easily work on things in other locations eg at our family bach down south or when travelling.

I figured that maybe having a laptop with the ability to add a bigger secondary monitor later on would be the best of both worlds.

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Jase2985

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#3067442 23-Apr-2023 21:48

Batman:

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

man you talk some garbage sometime. there are hundreds of different windows laptops, and i would say 75+% of them are good with thermal management.

Apple make less than 10 different models

Wombat1

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#3067448 23-Apr-2023 22:15

Jase2985:

Batman:

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

man you talk some garbage sometime. there are hundreds of different windows laptops, and i would say 75+% of them are good with thermal management.

Apple make less than 10 different models

Agree with you, was just reading this garbage about Intel. I am running an i7 as my JellyFin server and its more than capable of 4K transcoding, and all sorts of video editing. Never heard of an i7 overheating while watching youtube videos. For the op, any newer laptops that supports Intel QucikSync would be more than up to the job, if its coupled with a NVIDIA gpu even better. Personally I would also make sure that it has at least 16GB of RAM.

Wheelbarrow01

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#3067450 23-Apr-2023 22:30

MaxineN:

IMO the HP gaming laptop would be "fine" and heck because you've got the Nvidia GPU you can actually use it to encode/decode HEVC content and it wouldn't actually fall over with effects, transitions. The only thing I'd say is please upgrade it to 32GB RAM as soon as you can. Davinci likes memory. Ask me how I know.

The Vivobook would also be "okay", Okay gets a lesser grade from me simply because the aforementioned Vivobook that I own absolutely hates Windows with a passion and will occasionally BSOD where on Linux it will not fall over. Again Nvidia GPU is a big win here. The display will be a lot better for editing.

OK, how do you know? 😃

Something I just thought of is screen nits (brightness). The Vivobook has up to 550 nits peak, whereas the HP is about half that. I would think that this matters when trying to get true colour representation during the grading process.

My problem is I know nothing about what makes a good laptop. I've only ever bought three in my lifetime - all Sony Vaio's which, upon reflection, sucked - the longer I owned them, the slower and more useless they all got. Last purchase was over 10 years ago. I haven't owned/used my own laptop in several years now, preferring instead to use my work supplied Dell Lattitude laptop for everything. This has been somewhat limiting as I don't have admin rights so there's been no loading my own software onto it, but I've got by up till now.

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Jase2985

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#3067452 23-Apr-2023 22:36

nits is brightness, you want to be looking at how well it shows the different Color Space's and how well its calibrated from the factory.

michaelmurfy

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#3067462 23-Apr-2023 23:32

Wombat1:

Agree with you, was just reading this garbage about Intel. I am running an i7 as my JellyFin server and its more than capable of 4K transcoding, and all sorts of video editing. Never heard of an i7 overheating while watching youtube videos.

Neither agree or disagree here - we don't need people saying the advise from anyone is garbage so lets stop this. I've had some rubbish Intel based laptops with terrible thermal management and I've also had some OK ones too. I've had a whole lot of laptops in my lifetime. Worst I've ever had is a 2019 MacBook Pro that overheated at a drop of a hat (and thermal throttled) and 2nd worst was actually an Alienware gaming laptop with a Core i7 of some sort (can't remember the specs from memory) but this would get so hot it would burn my lap with watching YouTube videos. It really depends on your own personal experience here but for a laptop to be perfectly honest the base model M1 MacBook Pro is by-far the best laptop I have ever had. Even with only 8gb of ram it is really capable and I've even edited 4K video on it fine. The other thing with MacBook's is their screens are among the best you can get.

The Apple Silicon MacBook's do kick arse with thermal management, performance and battery life if you're looking for a good all-rounder. This is not just me saying this either, this is basically the opinion of many large YouTubers. The M1 Max and M1 MacBook Pro's still offer excellent performance and if you don't mind a second hand laptop this could be a perfect contender for video editing as well as a good all-round laptop.

I can't agree with this video more. My base model M1 MacBook Pro is still a really snappy beast 2 years on and I absolutely love using it.

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mattwnz

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#3067463 23-Apr-2023 23:50

Batman:

an old ipad with a M1 chip, anything with an M1 SOC

windows laptops are a waste of time due to thermal management (of severe lack of aka non existent). my very expensive 8 core i7 11th Gen Dell laptop overheats watching youtube videos

An M1 ipad is fairly new, but the issue will be storage space on the ipad and the software availability of the ipad versions of editing software. I have found it is far more restrictive then when using a proper computer. Then the cost possibly isn't that much less that just buying a macbook.

Wheelbarrow01

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#3067465 24-Apr-2023 00:20

michaelmurfy:

The Apple Silicon MacBook's do kick arse with thermal management, performance and battery life if you're looking for a good all-rounder. This is not just me saying this either, this is basically the opinion of many large YouTubers. The M1 Max and M1 MacBook Pro's still offer excellent performance and if you don't mind a second hand laptop this could be a perfect contender for video editing as well as a good all-round laptop.

Thanks for your input mate - I did wonder whether an M1 night do the job. Something like this?

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