PC for video editing - any recommendations?

fractal

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
My 9 year old MAC desktop just can't handle video files anymore for editing on iMovie.

Looking for a laptop - willing to go with a PC or Apple. Any opinions would be appreciated.
 

senor_jorge

Barbara Eden+? Bring it!!
No laptop recommendation, but I built something for a friends RTF major son several months ago. It was pricey! The demand for graphics cards to mine crypto currency has prices in low earth orbit. Between the GPU, RAM, storage, PSU, and 10 core CPU parts were between $3-4k.

As suggested above, it was essentially a gaming rig.
 

fractal

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
No laptop recommendation, but I built something for a friends RTF major son several months ago. It was pricey! The demand for graphics cards to mine crypto currency has prices in low earth orbit. Between the GPU, RAM, storage, PSU, and 10 core CPU parts were between $3-4k.

As suggested above, it was essentially a gaming rig.
Thanks,

Looking more around $2k or less for this.

But I may hit you up for a crypto mining rig sometime in the future, if you're game.
 

lazyboy97o

Well-Known Member
If you’re just using iMovie, and not interested in learning something more advanced, then the new M1 MacBook Pros would work well. You should be able to just transfer over a lot of your stuff and won’t have to learn much that is different.
 

fractal

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
I usually work with video on my MacBook. By the way, I plan to change my video editing software. Which one do you use?

I've used imovie but my 9 year old Mac just can't handle the files anymore. I'm shooting 1080p on my full frame Sony A7r2 so the files are large and I'm at the point I can't even load them into imovie.
 
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Otamin

Well-Known Member
There should be new Mac laptops (using the latest Apple Silicon chips) coming within the next few months if you're willing to wait.

As for software I'd highly recommend DaVinci Resolve since it's free, incredibly powerful and also an industry standard. I personally use Adobe Premiere, but only because I pay for Adobe Creative Cloud and use it for work, otherwise I'd happily use DaVinci Resolve for all of my editing work.
 

thomas998

Well-Known Member
There should be new Mac laptops (using the latest Apple Silicon chips) coming within the next few months if you're willing to wait.

As for software I'd highly recommend DaVinci Resolve since it's free, incredibly powerful and also an industry standard. I personally use Adobe Premiere, but only because I pay for Adobe Creative Cloud and use it for work, otherwise I'd happily use DaVinci Resolve for all of my editing work.
Davinci has much higher equipment requirements and can bog down systems without higher end graphics cards. I would never suggest someone run it on a laptop as even if your laptop works with the current version each time they come out with an upgrade to Davinci the system requirements go up as well. Resolve also has a fairly steep learning curve if you want to get everything you can out of it.

I would suggest just getting a higher end HP or Dell laptop with an i7 chip with 8gb of ram (more is always better) and a large SSD. Then get a copy of VSDC (free software) or if you are willing to pay Vegas Pro. Both are better than iMovie and would work well even on a decent laptop.

Yes you would use a macbook pro, I use one myself when I travel... but I use an old one that I can still upgrade and swap the SSD on whenever I want... the current Macs are like disposable cameras, you have what you have and if anything goes wrong you might as well toss it in the trash as Apple will charge you so much to repair that you might as well buy another new one and they aren't cheap. And while I have a macbook pro I'm running Windows on it so that I can use Vegas Pro which is light years ahead of imovie.
 

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