Anyone editing HDSLR with a laptop under $4K?

Mavoz

Well-known member
Am about to travel OS for 4-5 months and edit whilst on the road...

need for a laptop becomes apparent...

however my research seems to suggest this is very difficult without a very expensive laptop...

At Adobe forums specs recommended have been:

" i7-9xx CPU, not the mobile M version, 12 GB memory, GTX 460M, 2 or 3 7200 RPM disks. "


I essentially just need a functional system that provides live previews and doesn't crash every 5 minutes

Is anyone editing succesfully with Premiere Pro and a laptop?
What laptop and specs do you have?

*Note: Will be editing footage from a Canon 60D.
 
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Lenovo W510, a $1500 quad-core i7 CPU with a fairly potent Quadro FX880M graphics card and 4GB of Ram. Premiere handles AVCHD like butter on this system. If you've got more to spend and want to pour more into RAM or on a faster CPU (I think mine is the 1.7ghz chip, not the 920), go right ahead; I don't do any heavy-duty editing anymore but for what I do, the W510 is handling Premiere CS5 with ease.

Of course, I've used the hack to enable Mercury playback on my graphics card, that was enormously helpful.
 
Lenovo W510, a $1500 quad-core i7 CPU with a fairly potent Quadro FX880M graphics card and 4GB of Ram. Premiere handles AVCHD like butter on this system. If you've got more to spend and want to pour more into RAM or on a faster CPU (I think mine is the 1.7ghz chip, not the 920), go right ahead; I don't do any heavy-duty editing anymore but for what I do, the W510 is handling Premiere CS5 with ease.

Of course, I've used the hack to enable Mercury playback on my graphics card, that was enormously helpful.

Thanks Barry,

That gives me hope! I can appreciate a 4K laptop with 12 gig RAM etc..or a dedicated desktop is more powerful...but I thought there must be a way of doing some more basic cuts and edits with a system for a bit less than that....that while maybe 'slower' is still very workable...

Thank you....would love to hear others experiences on this!
 
Lenovo is great, HP has a good i7 Envy 17 with dual hard drives, Sony has the F series that has 1 hard drive but lots of I/O. 99.999% of people, even doing video editing, will not need more then 4GB of ram, so no need for 12GB in your laptop.
 
I have a HP dv7t with 8gb ram, 500gb hard drive (with space for another) and an ATI HD5670. I can't remember which i7 processor it has, but it is one of the mobile versions. It plays avchd and canon mp4 files fine using the software mercury engine. It does stuttter a bit when playing from the timeline for three or four minutes straight on a 30-45 minute project, but other than that it works great.

- Hunter
 
hey i happened to have come across an HP Pavillion dv 1260 us Laptop,but it has an AMD processor.I was curious as to will cs5 premiere pro work well for editing 7D footage? If anyone has used an AMD w an hack or anything and has had good results please let me know.thks a million guys!
 
Been doing this sort of thing with a £400 windows 7 based laptop, would reccomend using a macbook for this though; even a low end one.
 
With Cineform, we have been editing HD since the core 2 duo.
I now have an MSI GT660R that edits so easily, you never even think about it anymore. That laptop is selling for around $1,200 now.
1T raid drive, i7 processor, Dynaudio sound, Nvidia GTX285M graphics.
 
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