Student laptop question

[Mavoz Australia]

Hi,

I'm a media teacher in our school and one of our students has asked for my thoughts on a couple of laptops suitable for Premiere Pro (and some of the other CC software)

What do you think of his choices re Surface Book.

https://www.harveynorman.com.au/microsoft-surface-book-2-13-5-inch-i7-8gb-256gb.html

Bottom the one with 16 gb of ram and 512 ssd storage

https://www.harveynorman.com.au/microsoft-surface-book-2-13-5-inch-i7-16gb-512gb.html

Thanks,

Matt

[Jim_Simon]

I normally recommend the following:

1. 24" 1080 screen at minimum.

2. Five internal hard drives, arranged as...

System

Projects, audio, still images

Cache and Scratch

Camera media only

Exports

There is no Laptop in the world that can accommodate those minimums.  Recommend he build his own desktop.  He''ll have a much better experience.

[yenaphe]

Hi,

it really depends on what he wants to do. Ready & writing from the same HDD, even if it's an SSD is reducing performence greatly.

That being said, I've been playing with  the 16bg/512SSD Surface Book 2, and it's a good beast. For light / youtube like editing, this should be good enough. As Jim Simon​ stated above, for the same price he can built a more powerful, and more suited desktop computer.

If mobility is mandatory, then go for the 16gb with the nvidia 1050 gpu and 512. 8gb is going to be way too limitating.

Hope this helps,

Sébastien

[rodneyb56060189]

Adobe used to tell people what the minimum requirements were to run their programs. It was sometimes a bit less than what REALLY was needed to do things well. Hence, Jim Simon's suggestions. People have found that it is very demanding on a computer to edit a variety of video "flavors".

I while back ( 16 months ? ) I wanted a laptop just to use for internet ( my edit computer not on internet) AND to take on location for a video job if I ever got one.  With this laptop I wanted to be able to transfer SSD files from my camera to another external SSD. In other words, I just wanted a way to free up the camera SSD ( so I could shoot more if it got filled up ). I can hook up both SSD's via 2 USB 3 ports and use the laptop to Xfer files from one to the other.

So having the ports was important.

I also wanted to use a mouse instead of the touchpad. There is a USB 2 port for that. ( I disabled the touchpad cause I use the keyboard a lot and my hand rests on the touchpad, which did not make me happy ).

I also wanted a real internal BD drive and SD card reader built into machine. Now everyone wants to make laptops very thin so they stopped putting BD / DVD / CD drives in them.

I wanted a dedicated graphics card ( GeForce ) with DVI and HDMI outputs.

I wanted a big hard drive ( 7200 rpm … couldn't get black drive unfortunately ) and as much RAM as possible.

Odd as it sounds, this led me to an OLD ASUS laptop ( discontinued now and probably out of stock in all stores ).

So, if you look at the older stuff ( which is usually less expensive than the newest and shiniest model ) you may find something that is good.

In terms of editing, this thing does simple stuff just fine ( full HD screen and full HD video ( I use avid DNxHD ). I would NOT expect this thing to do any serious editing but for a student I think it would be fine.

I have CS6 installed on it, and Resolve.

The 1 Tera Byte HDD is NOT going to be good for serious editing.  For that you need to follow Jim Simon's suggestion.

: )

[Peru Bob]

Moved to the Hardware Forum.