Premiere Pro travel and spare laptop?

[Ashley7]

I'm interested in hearing thoughts on a good 15" travel laptop for Premiere Pro editing and reasonable encoding of small/moderate projects to H.264 (i.e., projects with several 1 to 3 hours of footage, approx 50GB to 250GB in raw footage per project, cut into a 5 to 20 minute final... small stuff. Footage is all from Canon DSLR ALL-I footage or Point-n-shoot/smartphone mp4 files.Projects typically use basic transitions and Lumetri... not much VFX... some AE now and then perhaps.

More specifically, I'm curious about thoughts on 15" laptop for Premiere editing... how bad is it? ... and...

Are there any recommended power or fav 15" laptops? (PC/Windows world.) So far I've been looking at the Dell XPS 15 9560 (specs below) because someone mentioned it in a post somewhere on this forum.

I'm considering getting a second 15" laptop with the following goals in mind...

• Primary reason: Something lighter weight and smaller for travel, but with enough perf to reasonably edit/encode.
• As a backup laptop in case my primary 17" MSI GT72S 6QD breaks down. I don't want to be stuck without any backup.
• As a backup laptop that I can use to encode while continuing to work on the primary.
• I have other backup-related procedures that tie up my MSI to the point where my day stalls because the laptop is dedicated to other work... I'd like to offset that to a second system.

My current MSI has a GTX 970M and 17" display. I'm not crazy about losing 2"s going from 17" to 15" but it seems many folks do laptop video editing on 15" just fine so I'm considering for travel and backup I can learn to appreciate the compactness for the compromise.

Here is the Dell I saw mentioned elsewhere on this forum...

Dell XPS 15 9560

7th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ, 32GB DDR4-2400MHz, GTX 1050 with 4GB GDDR5

http://www.dell.com/en-us/member/shop/productdetails/xps-15-9560-laptop/dncwxb1609s

Thanks in advance.

[RoninEdits · Accepted solution]

the specs on the dell laptop you link is what we would point you at. 24gb of ram or gtx 1050 ti 4gb are alternatives that might help broaden your purchasing options. you might find even more laptops that only come with 16gb, but can be upgraded to hold more.

[Ashley7]

RoninEdits wrote:

the specs on the dell laptop you link is what we would point you at. 24gb of ram or gtx 1050 ti 4gb are alternatives that might help broaden your purchasing options. you might find even more laptops that only come with 16gb, but can be upgraded to hold more.

Thanks Ronin.