Looking for a new Laptop for 4K Video Editing

[jimmy5D95]

I am looking for a new laptop for video editing in Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Maya

1) Do you need 32GB or 16 RAM to playback 4K footage in real-time (full rels)


What laptop do you edit your work on vai 4k footage.....

Thanks again 🙂

[Ann Bens]

Start here:Adobe Premiere Pro CC System Requirements 

[John T Smith]

Previous Laptop ideas https://community.adobe.com/t5/video-hardware/best-laptop-for-running-premiere-pro/td-p/9525675
-and cooling https://www.amazon.com/AICHESON-Cooling-Notebook-MacBook-Computer/dp/B07CGMHP24/

[jimmy5D95]

Thnaks, John/.... Ill have a look at them....

[Michael Grenadier]

and a laptop may not be ideal for 4k editing but could work with a proxy workflow...  

[R Neil Haugen]

And go to the Video Hardware forum to see what has already been discussed on this there.

Neil

[RjL190365]

I am a long-time user of Premiere Pro. I am now in need of a new video editing laptop, with energy costs now increasing faster than wages in the coming months. I am planning to temporarily mothball my main Windows 11 desktop PC with its Ryzen 9 5900X CPU due to the drastically skyrocketing electrical costs.

I could downgrade both the CPU and the GPU in my main desktop, but I do not want such a major downgrade in performance. So laptop it is for me.

I am willing to even switch to Mac for this. My thought for a Mac would be a 14-inch M1 Pro 10-core model.

Is my plan a good idea? Or shall I stick to Windows, and suffer from the same old conundrum between energy usage and performance knowing that Windows laptops are far less efficient than any MacBook in terms of performance versus energy?

[Graeme Bull]

I use a Predator with RTX2080 in it with i7 2.6g and only 16GB of ram and it's going along fantastic so far. 1TB SSD working drive. Hopefully that helps.

[chrisw44157881]

it's a mixed bag, like all things in life. check out the chart that compares the M1 to other laptops and desktops.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-max-benchmarked-in-adobe-premier-pro

[Michael Grenadier]

and apple fanboys sometimes resemble a cult...  and choose to ignore or downplay inherent limitations.  I'm working on a first generation M-1 macbookpro for a client and there are all sorts of issues that were never mentioned in the adulation that greeted it's release...     So you need to do "due diligence" before purchasing a new computer.  This forum is a great resource to see what issues are arising if you're commited to working in Premiere.  

[RjL190365]

For me. the astronomical increase in my household's electric bill is the final straw. It went up from about $150 per month at the beginning of this year to almost $400 this past month (for only a very slight increase in total power usage)! And this while total household wages and pay remained flat during this time.

Furthermore, I am fed up with the ever-increasing bloating and resource-hogging of every single Windows update.

That said, a laptop that has roughly the same level of performance would have cost me a lot more money than the roughly $2,000 USD that I was planning to spend. And that's not to mention that it would have consumed almost as much electrical power (if this were a Windows laptop) as my desktop.

In the end, I ended up with a base-model MacBook Air (with 8 GB RAM, a 7-core GPU and 256 GB of internal storage). I do not expect it to be as powerful as my current desktop; however, if my new laptop proved about as fast and powerful (performance-wise) as my last desktop quad-core CPU-based PC with a decent discrete GPU of its vintage (think a 2016 desktop), I would gladly accept the compromises.

[Michael Grenadier]

8 gigs of RAM is marginal at best and a macbookair is not gonna be sufficient for many common editing tasks.  What resolution and codec do you work with?  And are you willing to spend hours and hours on exporting with an underpowered machine.   Have you checked that this machine matches the minimum specs for premeire?  do a search here for the link to the adobe page with the minimum required specs... and the requirements will only go up as adobe updates premiere...

[RjL190365]

I am already prepared to spend hours, if not days or weeks, just to render even one simple short video. This is because all those days put together still ends up with much lower total power consumption than even a few minutes with my current desktop.

Besides, most of my video shooting is only 1080i/p anyway, so why waste it? And even if I were editing 4k, I would do simple cuts with that material on this MacBook and then perform my final exports on my desktop (which will see less use over the coming months).

A Windows laptop of the same price would have been no better than this MacBook Air because they have either a GPU which does not support hardware decoding or encoding at all or only integrated graphics. And for the most part they are still running 11th-Gen quad-core Intel i5 or i7 low-power (U-series) Tiger Lake CPUs that are no more powerful than the base M1 chip while consuming significantly more electrical power. (Alder Lake mobile CPU-powered laptops currently start at a price point that's well above $1,500, and based on my own food and necessary needs spending I would have to wait many, many months just to earn that much additional money.)

You can't do much about it if you're only earning retail-store wages. And that's the financial situation that I'm in right now and for the foreseeable future. In other words, you pretty much get what you pay for, and if you are not earning enough money after spending on essential personal needs, you might as well close up shop (as far as video editing assignments are concerned).

And that's considering that my current laptop (equipped with a 4th-Gen dual-core low-power mobile i5 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and only integrated graphics) could barely render the PugetBench benchmark timelines at all, not to mention that it has recently been feeling sluggish on everyday apps (even with reinstalls of Windows 10). So virtually anything would be way better than my old laptop.

EDIT: My first results from this MacBook have been posted last night in the PugetBench site's database. With an external SSD, it scored a 401 in the benchmark - and that's with the MacBook running on only battery power. This score roughly equalled the best results that I had previously achieved with a five-year-old desktop 7th-Gen Intel i7-7700 system with both its integrated Intel HD Graphics 630 enabled and a discrete GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER installed (and with 32 GB of DDR4-2400 RAM, to boot).

[RjL190365]

My own personal update:

My results with the base MacBook Air settled down into the upper 300s (380s to 390s) using the Standard preset. And now I know why these results came out as very, very typical for this type of computer: I was using a USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 external SSD for my media and project files. You see, the maximum theoretical throughput of USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 is only 1.26 GB/s (and the maximum practical throughput of USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 is no more than 1.05 GB/s) - a far cry from even the 3.94 GB/s for PCI-e 3.0 x4 internal connections, let alone Thunderbolt 3. And because NLE video editing software relies heavily on drive throughput because the decompress video on the fly for viewing, this makes even 1.1 GB/s limiting for higher-rez video work.