Forumite › General Topics › Tech › PC Talk › Video Editing laptop
- This topic has 34 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 4 months ago by Ed P.
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- October 21, 2020 at 6:18 pm #62842
What with the lovely Welsh winter on the way and the likelihood of lockdowns at various times I’m contemplating buying a new laptop for video editing using OpenShot. I may well Linux it at some point.
My ancient i5 X220 does it bit it’s like trying to drive a sports car up a rutted track that’s 3 feet deep in mud.While being stabbed in both eyes. It’s not fun and damn slow.
I’ve found this, which is above what I want to spend (which is nothing, but the budget was £800). I need a small size now that I’m used to my featherweight ChromeBook. The RAM is maxed out, just as well as it’s soldered on to the motherboard, the NVMe SSD can be upgraded if needed. I doubt that’ll be the case for a while, it’ll be clips around 10 minutes or so while I wrap my head around how to do drive OpenShot.
Any one have any thoughts on my choice?
T.I.A
October 22, 2020 at 7:19 am #62855Well thin and light paints you into a corner, but TBH they’re all moving towards “no user serviceable parts inside”.
Specs wise it’s pretty much top of the tree without a dedicated graphics card so you’re not going to get much better anywhere. Storage wise it has USB C so I’d look there, or a NAS, for extra storage.
Go for it.
October 22, 2020 at 8:24 am #62857Thanks Dave.
Pretty much what I thought but I’m not that up to date with PC specs so my head was hurting after all the research.
Always good to have another view point if your not sure. 👍 :good:
October 22, 2020 at 9:05 am #62859The 10th gen Intel chips are fairly good, if my Surface is anything to go by. My i5-1035G4 in the Surface handles itself well, being reasonably comparable to my Ryzen 5 4600H in my modelling benchmarks.
"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett
October 22, 2020 at 11:30 am #62864I’ve ordered it, should have it tomorrow, just in time for the Welsh lockdown.
October 22, 2020 at 2:52 pm #62869Take a look at Linux kdenlive. The editing part is slick and the rendering step renders up to 4K in HEVC. I run it as a vm and speed never bothers me as using a vm means the pc can be used for other things while rendering is taking place. The host is a first gen Ryzen with 16Gb of memory so it is probably pretty close to the specs of most middle ground laptops.
October 22, 2020 at 3:08 pm #62871Meant to add the 4K render from kdenlive is 4K UHD and using HEVC means file sizes are about 60% of normal 4K files. My guess would be that you will find this a perfectly acceptable editor, though as is usual with FOSS you will need to dig around in the forums for visual effects, and only find out later that mplayer and frei0r should be installed to use some tools such as sharpening etc.
Well worthwhile playing with it as it punches well above its weight.
October 22, 2020 at 4:08 pm #62873Thanks Ed, I will have a look at kdenlive, I’m open to anything that’s free and I’m not stuck on OpenShot, it just ticks the boxes for what I want too do.
October 22, 2020 at 4:52 pm #62881The 10th Gen G4 graphics can’t really compete with a dedicated card.
In 3D Mark Time Spy my surface pro 7 runs at 3-4 FPS but my desktop with a Radeon RX480 manages about 25.
The video encode/decode is about the same though so you may be OK for video work.
October 22, 2020 at 5:06 pm #62883WOF, it’s going to be a LOT better than my X220, it took about 3 1/2 hours to render a 9 minute video in 4K.
October 22, 2020 at 9:50 pm #62885Ouch 😁
October 23, 2020 at 6:49 am #62888That is REALLY slow, even my vm machine is probably at least 5 times faster, though I suspect kdenlive’s ability to use hardware rendering probably makes the big difference.
October 23, 2020 at 7:38 am #62893Correction – I did a test 4K render, my vm is ~20 times faster!
October 23, 2020 at 8:00 am #62896Ed,the X220 was old when I got it.
It might be 9 years old in total. It’s solid though and just keeps working.
I’ll never get rid of it, it’ll probably outlive me!
I’ll render the same clip on the new rig when it arrives for a comparison.
October 23, 2020 at 11:39 am #62898It arrived just before 9, been doing updates and the like since then.
Ran Geekbench and I was disappointed. Then I remembered the performance profiles, checked that and it was set to balanced, new profile created and all is good. :good:
It gets 1239 on the single core test, 3196 on the multi core and 5980 on OpenCL.
October 23, 2020 at 8:44 pm #62907Much faffing about with Windoze convinced me to Linux it.
After a few OpenShot renders.
The file was 13 minutes, not the 9 I thought it was. I used the H.264 QSV, it was just H.264 on the X220. The same settings as the mega long render on the X220 (4K, 60 FPS, High quality took 49 minutes. Dropping the FPS to 30 took 32 minutes. Dropping the quality to medium took 34 minutes. :wacko:
I can’t tell the difference between the 60 and 30 fps high quality renders, I think I can see a tiny difference between them and the 30 fps medium render but I’m not 100% certain.
Installing Mint was a PINTA, it would boot fine of a flash drive (after some tinkering with the UEFI settings) but it would fail the installation. Turns out it hated some of my flash drives. :scratch:
October 24, 2020 at 7:40 am #62911Try the HEVC codec (h265). It gives much smaller files with no discernable loss in quality.
October 24, 2020 at 8:05 am #62914That’s part of the plan for this weekend. Along with trying kdenlive.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>On Windoze there was only the normal h265, not the QSV one.</p>
Haven’t done any Linux rendering on the new rig yet.
October 24, 2020 at 8:13 am #62916I just ran Geekbench 5 on my Surface Pro 7 and it scores 1237 on the single core test, 4423 on the multicore and 8129 on Open CL.
Was your Windows setup running something in the background ?
October 24, 2020 at 8:58 am #62918WOF, not sure if anything was running in the background. It’s entirely possible as it was when I was jumping through the many Windows hoops.
I’ll run it on Linux later.
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