Laptop Advice

T

taygreen

New member
Hey everyone! First of all, I just want to say thanks to the community for being so helpful. This is my go-to site for advice and research. Y'all are awesome.

I'm looking for a thread or advice on what're the best laptops for video editing. Macbook Pro comes heavily recommended (and that solid aluminum casing is pretty clutch), but there have to be Windows equivalents, right? And you can spend that money you save on more RAM or higher bus speeds? And is the Macbook regular just not worth it?

What about a Hackintosh, modding a Windows to run OS X? Also, firewire's pretty important, as I'll be shuttling a bunch of data between the hard drive and an external.

I use an HMC-150, so importing the footage will be easy either way.

What are some experiences, pros and cons, everyone's had with their laptop editing workflows? I love Avid and Final Cut, so that's not really an issue.

Budget is between $550 and $1300, and editing is the main purpose for the machine.

Thanks!


Taylor Green
 
got a MBP from Macmall.com for $1200 this last summer. it's only the 13" (using it with a second monitor so who cares) and 2GB RAM (inexpensive upgrade to 4GB), it works just fine with FCP 7, et al. inlcuding HD footage via FW800. I LOVE how cool this thing stays and the battery life of the thing too, I can take it with me and do basic editing stuff anywhere for hours without a charge. Highly recommended and doesn't compare with any PC laptop I've ever worked on. I'm sure there are plenty of good ones around but I've only had good experiences with desktops. best of luck!
 
I wouldn't use a Hackintosh to do any serious editing. In my experience they are prone to instability. Also I think that $1300 may be a little low. If you have a 2nd monitor a 13"laptop is fine but if you want to edit on the run then you are gonna want to have at least 15" also you want to make sure that you get 4gb of ram (don't buy the ram for apple get it from newegg or somewhere else), you want a 7200 RPM hard drive, and you want a decently powerfull cpu (I would say 2.3ghz dual core or more).

So looking at apples site that would put you with the $1500 13" or the $1700". Remeber that with computers (laptops especially becuase you can't upgrade them) if you spend a good amount of money upfront it could be 4+ years before you really need to upgrade.
 
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