Participating Frequently

Question

Laptop for editing with Adobe Premiere & After Effects CS6

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
December 14, 2012
2 replies
54206 views

Hi, I'm just started a company working with young people, and I need a laptop for editing some videos (short films/music videos).

I was looking at a cheap laptop to be able to run Adobe Premiere and After Effects smoothly. I was told that this laptop would run smoothly:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-envy-m6-1178sa-15-6-laptop-17419990-pdt.html

Can anyone confirm this? The graphics card is not listed on the Adobe's website but I was told it's compatible?

Im new to this stuff so please help, thank you.

This topic has been closed for replies.

S

StencilMedia

Participant

If you're still in the market for a new laptop then you can do far worse than the one I've just got: Toshiba Satellite L855 - 10W (£635 inc VAT)

Quad Core i7-3630QM 2.4Ghz with Turbo Boost up to 3.2Ghz (Hyper Threading gives it 8 logical cores)

6Gb of 1600Mhz RAM which I've upgraded to 16Gb of RAM

750Gb Hard Drive

ATI HD7670M 2Gb Graphics Card

USB 3.0 (I use an external 3.0 drive with it)

15.4" 1366x768 screen (will output at up to 2k through the HDMI port though)

I did plenty of research and it was the best set up I could find for After Effects that was under £1000. I would have preferred an NVIDIA card for the 'cuda action' but the card works well with things like Element 3D. A Full HD screen would have been nice as well, but I can live without it. Never knew about the 900 pixels minimum but this is the 5th laptop I've used with AE, (all of which had less than 900) and I've never had any problems. That's on 7.0, CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and CS6.

I agree that like for like you're going to get loads more for your money when it comes to a desktop, but I've always preferred laptops and I travel around lot so it's good to be able to work on the road. And as I've always worked on latops I've got a kind of "don't know what you're missing as you've never had it" kind of outlook when it comes to desktop performance vs laptop performance.

I'm not saying that anybody here is wrong... I'm sure most here know a lot more than me when it comes to After Effects, but I've never had a 900+ screen or dual 7,400 drives and I've not really come across any problems. And it's not like I'm just 'dabbling' for fun or anything, I'm no ILM, but I've done work for TV, the web, and some big companies.

Anyway, good luck!

Scott

4

420ProductionAuthor

Participating Frequently

I got the ASUS N56VZ! It's really fast, so far so good. Thanks for the advice anyway.

S

StencilMedia

Participant

Glad you managed to get it sorted. I've taken a look at the specs and it's looking like a pretty impressive peice of kit. If I had an extra couple of hundred lying around then that would probably be the one I'd have gone for... you'll be glad of the Nvidia card if you're doing a lot of editing in Premiere. I'd upgrade the RAM to 16Gb when you get chance though, you should notice much better performance.

Just wanted to cover a couple of the other points raised in this thread... I'm working on a laptop and I thought I'd test my performace based on some of the comments made. So I've added a three hour, single layer DV clip to my timeline in Premiere Pro, and set it to render. Well, I took a five minute clip and duplicated it a bunch of times to get to three hours. I have two external USB3.0 drives, but for the purposes of the test: my footage, OS, AE and output location are all on my internal 5,400 drive. I disconnected all other drives. You can see my full specs a bit higher up in the thead, but it's a quad core i7 with 16Gb of RAM.

Total time remaining: 33 minutes and I think it said around 40 minutes when I started it running.

Sure, some might consider that fast, some might consider it mediocre, but I don't think it could be classed as 'mind-numbingly slow' if a three hour clip is rendering at less than an hour. If a desktop is going to render that at 1000 times faster then surely that would take less than five seconds?!

I'm not disagreeing with what people are saying here (maybe apart from that AE/Pr won't run if you don't have a 900+ pixel screen!), the fact that faster external drives and a dektop over a laptop will give better perfromance are all very valid. However, suggesting that rendering a three hour film will take weeks on a modern latop is far from accurate.

EDIT: Yep, took 39 minutes in total. Someone mentioned rendering out 12 minutes worth of footage as well, so I thought I'd give that a try. That took just over 2 minutes.

Harm_Millaard

Inspiring

It does not meet minimum requirements.

See What laptop to get for CS5 or CS6.

4

420ProductionAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for the reply. Would you be able to to tell me what part doesn't meet the requirement as I was told my the "experts" at PC WORLD that it would work, in fact they were so adamant they said they will write it on the receipt and if it fails to work they would refund all the money back to me.

R

RjL190365

Legend

There's a lot of twisting of other people's words going on here, and it needs to stop. There's a lot of unverified (non-peer-reviewed) information being tossed around as facts, and there are significantly skewed perspectives on both sides of the issue.

Premiere Pro's price, especially with a cloud subscription, is no longer a barrier to casual hobbyists and novices. We here can expect that the cross-section of users will range from complete beginners to extremely capable experts. Some of the former type of user may not be willing to spend a ton of money on a higher-end system, and will be content to make due with lower-spec computers. They should be warned, gently, that they may find the editing experience to be less than ideal. But less-than-ideal is a very different thing than completely unacceptable.

The minimum requirements listed by Adobe will work for certain types of footage and can meet certain editor's needs. If an individual with no deadlines, no bosses and no income riding on the outcome of an editing session with Premiere Pro is willing to wait overnight or until the folowing day for an export to complete, then so be it. If they come here to complain about how long it takes, or how they only get a few seconds of smooth playback in the timeline, then we can let them know that the solution involves cost -- either time or money, and sometimes both.

Until that time, however, posting about system requirements that do not apply to everyone, and insisting that those requirements be met regardless of the user's real needs, doesn't help at all. Conversely, there are serious limits to a low-end system that new users need to take into account before purchasing hardware.

Jeff

Jeff,

We all have different levels of "acceptability". For me, even though I am a casual user with no deadlines and no income, taking overnight to export several hours worth of single-layered HD (1080i/p) video (or one to two hours worth of multi-layered HD video) is tolerable - but waiting overnight to export a few seconds or even a few minutes worth of single-layered SD (480i) video is clearly unacceptable - and even taking overnight to export even a few minutes of single-layered HD video would have left me frustrated. On a system with such extremely sluggish levels of performance, I would not run or even install Premiere Pro CS6 at all.

I got the ASUS N56VZ! It's really fast, so far so good. Thanks for the advice anyway.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded