Looking for a good video editing laptop

[epolice]

Unbelievably helpful, everyone. Thanks a bunch!

 

[АлександрД]

32GB is a good start.

now is difficult to find SSD of that size (standard SATA SSD) minimal is 120 or 250Gb

an M.2 drive that does "NVME"

In that case is good to have a look at the Optane memory. It is quite expencive, but have great advantages. Intel® Optane™ Memory Series Product Specifications or Intel® Optane™ Memory M10 Series Product Specifications
With supporting of Intel Rapid Storage Technology it could work as very fast cache for harddrive. Or you can use it as drive for OS.
And secondary drive you can use e.g. like this Intel® SSD E 7000s Series Product Specifications

Thunderbolt 3 port

Now USB 3 much more popular for external home storages and speed is near the same (does not matter, you will transfer your project 2 or 4 minutes, anyway you have bottleneck in HDD speed, not in the bus speed)
But for many other devices - yes, this could be good idea. But... where you will stay your mobility....

 

[FezUSA]

@АлександрД: 32GB is memory (RAM), not SSD size!! Same goes for the M.2 NVME specification. Memory and storage are often confused but are very different things. Memory is short-term and temporarily holds data. When turning off a computer you 'lose' what is in memory. Storage on the other hand is long-term and is kept until appropriately wiped clean.

 

[D_Fresh]

@kelemvor really nailed it with that post.

But basically, as said, current/fast CPU, 32gb ram, largest SSDs you can afford (hopefully 2 SSDs), but to really get the benefits from Adobe Premiere or After Effects, you really need a compatible, dedicated, GPU, not a "graphics on board" solution.... a real GPU that is on Adobe's list of compatible GPUs.

I'm on desktop, Windows 7, i7-4770k CPU overclocked, 32gb DDR3 ram, 500gb SSD for OS and Software, 4tb WD Black for bulk storage, and 2 more SSDs for video and cache. Rockstar! Except....where my system falls short is my GPU, AMD FirePro... I built the system for 3D CAD (Solidworks, 3DS Max, and Autocad).... It's not compatible with Adobe's GPU accelerator . But honestly, I get by ok, and render at night (still only 2hours each vid, but I tend to batch render).

 

[epolice]

Do you know if the NVMe SSD from Samsung that you linked to is compatible with a Dell XPS 9570?

1. There's something missing from the SSD advice above. You want an M.2 drive that does "NVME". That will be around 10x faster than a traditional SSD. The Samsung 970 Pro is currently the best consumer NVME ssd you can get but any NVME ssd will be excellent. Personally I would not get any SSD that lacked NVME right now. Caution: There are M.2 drives that are not NVME capable, and those aren't any better than a normal SATA SSD. Therefore, the "buzz word" you want to look for is NVME. Some NVME are faster than others, but even the slowest NVME is so blazing fast compared to anything else. NVME is kind of a "game changer" making SLC vs MLC flash mostly irrelevant. The technical detail here is that the CPU gets 4 direct pci express lanes between the CPU and the NVME device. Even the cheapest NVME devices can read or write nearly 1GB/second. That rivals the $20,000.00 FusionIO storage that I use at work (for a couple hundred bucks).

2. Make sure your laptop has an NVIDIA GPU and at least 2GB dedicated video ram (not shared). This will allow you to enable the "mercury playback engine" in Adobe Premiere. It makes any computationally intensive task significantly faster in Premiere. Effects that might take an hour to apply, may only take a minute or two. Many special effects that require calculation normally can be previewed in real time. Here's a youtube video where some guy compares the two so that you can see the performance difference: This is not a dig against Intel or AMD GPU's, but I don't believe Adobe supports GPU acceleration with anything other than nVidia. Therefore you must get nVidia. It doesn't really matter much which nVidia GPU you get as long as the laptop has at least 2GB video ram and an nVidia GPU of some kind. You do not have to spend a lot on the latest and greatest. Any nVidia GPU (if it was made in the last 5 years) will do.

3. Ram. As much as you can afford. Consider 8GB the bare minimum, 16GB would be better, 32GB would be better still. RAM is fairly inexpensive these days for desktops, I've got 96GB in the system I use for Adobe CS, but that's not a laptop. Getting laptops with lots of memory capacity can often be difficult and expensive.

4. Thunderbolt 3 port. If you can get a laptop with this kind of port, your laptop will be as up-gradable as any desktop. You can attach external graphics adapters, external storage etc all at very high speed. This is something you might not necessarily use right now but it could keep you from having to replace the laptop in a few years when you want an upgrade. This isn't a must have, but it's a very good idea to have.

5. Colorimiter. This is an external device that plugs into a USB port. It allows you to tune monitors (and televisions). If you have a colorimiter, you could connect a 4k TV to your machine and adjust the color on it. You wind up with a very inexpensive high quality display since most 4k tv's also support wide color gamut. You can get a colorimeter for around $100 and no mater what kind of display you use (even the built-in laptop display) this thing will be your best friend. I use this one (it's discontinued) https://www.amazon.com/ColorVision-...er+datacolor&qid=1553709528&s=gateway&sr=8-12 . Under $100 on Amazon. Even a colorimeter this old will work very well. The newer ones are generally better but the old ones get the job done nicely and won't break the bank

Edit: Whoops.. I'm out of date. Premiere supports OpenCL now in addition to CUDA. That means you should be able to use just about any nVidia, AMD, or Intel graphics adapter for HW acceleration.

 

[FezUSA]

Review this article.

How to upgrade the SSD in a Dell XPS 15 (9570)

 

[epolice]

Thanks!

 

[kelemvor]

now is difficult to find SSD of that size (standard SATA SSD) minimal is 120 or 250Gb

I think you misunderstood. He was recommending 32GB of RAM rather than mass storage.

In that case is good to have a look at the Optane memory. It is quite expencive, but have great advantages. Intel® Optane™ Memory Series Product Specifications or Intel® Optane™ Memory M10 Series Product Specifications
With supporting of Intel Rapid Storage Technology it could work as very fast cache for harddrive. Or you can use it as drive for OS.
And secondary drive you can use e.g. like this Intel® SSD E 7000s Series Product Specifications

Optane is kind of dated. It is considerably slower than a typical nvme m.2 drive and very small capacity. 7000s has better capacity but even worse performance. Neither are inexpensive. From Intel's product pages

Intel SSD 7000s ($559 USD $0.58/GB):
Capacity: 960GB
Sequential Read (up to) 400 MB/s
Sequential Write (up to) 270 MB/s

Intel Optane M10 ($144 USD $2.25/GB):
Capacity: 64GB
Sequential Read (up to) 1450 MB/s
Sequential Write (up to) 640 MB/s

Samsung 970 Pro ($347 USD $0.33/GB):
Capacity: 1TB
Sequential Read (up to) 3500MB/s
Sequential Write (up to) 2700MB/s
I've never used Optane or 7000s, but I can confirm the 970 pro does perform as advertised. Optane was a great idea, unfortunately NVME came out shortly after Optane was released and that pretty much eliminated any useful market for Optane.

Now USB 3 much more popular for external home storages and speed is near the same (does not matter, you will transfer your project 2 or 4 minutes, anyway you have bottleneck in HDD speed, not in the bus speed)
But for many other devices - yes, this could be good idea. But... where you will stay your mobility....

I agree that USB3 is great and more popular. In fact, on my board the USB3 ports and Thunderbolt ports are shared. The advantage to thunderbolt is that several manufacturers are making external expansion board boxes that connect to laptops over thunderbolt. That means you can use one of these for nearly unlimited expansion of a laptop. That's amazing considering that laptops typically have near zero upgrade/expansion capability. I believe you can even run multiple monitors from a single thunderbolt connection.

In short, I would want both USB3 and Thunderbolt on a modern machine. You don't really have to look for USB3 when shopping, because USB3 support comes natively with every single modern chipset that is being made. If you buy a new computer (not old stock) it will have usb3. Not every board comes with Thunderbolt support, so you'd have to get lucky or specifically shop for that.

PS:
Yes, nvme really is THAT fast. When I pre-ordered the 970 pro, I was ready to post a scathing review and youtube video. I was kind of excited about it, because I hadn't seen anyone yet debunking the crazy performance claims. Well, to my surprise (and delight) the drive really does run as fast as they claim. It is hard to take, considering that 1 year before that I had bought a bunch of 1.2TB FusionIO cards with a pricetag of just over $20,000 each. The FusionIO cards that I got are not as fast as the nvme devices. The FusionIO still beat an m.2 nvme on IOPS, but not by a huge margin.

 

[mnscuber]

Great topic/discussion. What should one look for in a screen/panel? Thanks!