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420Production
Participating Frequently
December 14, 2012
Question

Laptop for editing with Adobe Premiere & After Effects CS6

  • December 14, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 54207 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.

2 replies

S
StencilMedia
Participant
January 2, 2013

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
January 4, 2013

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

S
StencilMedia
Participant
January 12, 2013

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
Harm_Millaard
Inspiring
December 14, 2012

It does not meet minimum requirements.

See What laptop to get for CS5 or CS6.

4
420ProductionAuthor
Participating Frequently
December 14, 2012

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.

Harm_Millaard
Harm_Millaard
Inspiring
December 14, 2012

For one, it does not have the monitor resolution required, which requires at least 900 vertical resolution. It does not have two physical different SATA 7200 RPM drives.

If you want to work in the blind, without seeing the complete user interface and guessing at the option you choose on a system slower than molasses in winter, go ahead, but the people at PC WORLD do not know what they are talking about. They are from another world.

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