Currently working on a 2011, 13" Macbook Pro using Adobe Premiere CS6, (as well as Lightroom and Photoshop for my photography).
In work I'm an assistant editor and work in Avid MC on PCs.
Anyone any recommendations?
Posted Feb 3, 2016, 10:50 PM UTC
I was in a similar situation and I bought a Lenovo y700 (around $1000), which I use for Premiere and After Effects. So far I've had no issues. Buying a gaming laptop that is not too gaudy could be a good option for price/perfomance ratio. It has an i7, 16GB of DDR4 Ram, and a GeForce 960M GPU which I have been able to use with CUDA in both Premiere and AE. If you have to buy a laptop (as I did), you could go for something like that or perhaps spend more and get a retina 15" macbook pro with similar specs. Either way should be good.
EDIT: Actually I did have one issue: I had to calibrate the monitor because it wasn't accurate from factory.
Going to recommend against Lenovo. They've got that whole "we pre-installed malware on our computers, but not the business computers; oops, yeah, we lied, we do it with business computers too" stink going on.
Fair point. I did a clean install of windows to avoid this, but it's a step consumers shouldn't be expected to take. There are some alternatives by Acer and Asus. Still, I'm pretty happy with my choice :)
Didn't Lenovo hide the malware in the firmware so it gets reinstalled on a fresh installation? Not sure about your model, but shit like that makes me avoid a company altogether.
That would be really messed up. Fortunately I don't think it's the case with my model since I made a bit of research about this specific model and I didn't find any mention of it other than the typical bloatware that comes with pre-installed windows (which I fixed with a clean install). But if that's the case, it's probably better to avoid stuff like that. In any case, I frankly bought this one because I liked the keyboard and the design, but the alternatives from Asus and Acer (and as someone else mentioned below, the Surface Book) offer similar good options for the same price. Though I would say that based on price, the Surface Book is an alternative to the MacBook Pro.
Post-IBM Lenovos are infamous for low quality and built-in malware. Also, any rhetoric that pertains to "gaming laptops" in the realm of editing should be moved to r/videoediting
These days the overlap in hardware demands between editing needs and gaming is almost indistinguishable. You don't need the double precision math of a Quadro to take advantage of the oodles of CUDA cores.
Oh please. Just because a laptop has a gaming GPU (which are much better than integrated graphics) doesn't mean it belongs only to the realm of amateur video editing. That seems pretentious tbh.
That way of thinking should remain in the pre-IBM era. Gaming has helped video production and editing with well priced well specced graphics options for years.
The Asus ZenBook Pro and the Microsoft Surface Book are both my favorite windows based laptops that are currently offered.
I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad S540. I'm really satisfied and can hardly recommend it. Attractive price-performance ratio.
The best mac laptop for editing (and arguably the best laptop in general when it comes to build quality, battery life, SSD, screen quality, and power) is the 2015 15" rMBP with the m370x GPU.
The best PC laptop IMO is the HP Zbooks, they have great screens, TB2, SSD's on par with apple, a good warranty and solid CPU/GPU options. I also believe they are putting the new mobile xeons in them soon.
It's already out with their G3 otions.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/zbook-studio.html