I need a simple laptop, mainly for editing GoPro type videos, and backing up my photos. And by editing I just mean splicing stuff together, adding music and speeding up boring sections. Nothing special. I’d like lots of storage space as well. I don’t play any intensive games really, a couple of very simple Rc flight sims maybe. Maybe. Any good suggestions? Suggestions for video editing software?
GoPros have their own editing software that will work just fine for what you want to do. It’s called Quick.
https://shop.gopro.com/softwareandapp/quik-%7C-desktop/Quik-Desktop.html#
The requirements say Win 10 and core i3 or better. You should be able to get a pretty cheap laptop with that. You can use an external drive for storage (there are some stupid big ones out there now).
As usual, getting a bit more than you think you need is always a good idea. There is also a sweet spot of price / performance where you get the best bang for you buck. I am not sure where that is now, but I would guess somewhere around $1000?
R/C sims are all about seeing the plane, so I would make sur it has an HDMI port so you can hook it up to a larger TV.
aircooled said:As usual, getting a bit more than you think you need is always a good idea. There is also a sweet spot of price / performance where you get the best bang for you buck. I am not sure where that is now, but I would guess somewhere around $1000?
Quoted for truth.
I just went overkill a bit with a $1200 Republic Of Gamers from Asus, but I'm planning on editing a lot of 1080p and some 4K, and at the same time doing music/studio recording and composition.
Look for a good video card and lots of memory. Tons of memory. When memory starts getting full, it "borrows" disk space and things get slow and glitchy. A very bad thing for video.
I have 16gb plus a dedicated 6gb in the video card. It's an GeForce GTX 1060 with 1280 cores. Jeebus it's sweet. I have the option of upgrading to 32gb but so far I haven't made it past about 50% memory use during some heavy times. When I'm in the studio and crushing video, audio, and downloading/streaming we'll see how it does.
Here is the best buy link for what I have. Overkill, but glorious. I got mine as an open box for $1198.
In reply to Curtis :
A little overkill? Good god. That's the same GPU(+3gb) I have in my gaming/streaming PC.
I do video editing on just my laptop. Asus i7, 12gig ram, 1080p screen, seems to work just fine. Having an independent GPU like Curits has will come in handy when you start doing any gaming. We got my wife a Legion with a GTX 1050 GPU because I hog the PC to stream nightly.
If you're going to gao all out, I'd always recommend a PC, but from what it sounds, that would be completely unnecessary. Even on a PC, though, I've managed to overhead the GPU. 
I'm using a cheap Asus laptop with a Celron processor and 4 gig of memory. It's not fast but it gets the job done just fine. I think it was $250 on sale from Amazon.
I guess it depends on how much video you are going to be editing. I'm editing 2-3 minute videos from autocross using Movie Maker. It can grind through one of them in a couple of minutes. If you are doing longer videos, you probably want something faster.
Edit: All of my long term storage is on a couple of 2T portable HDD. The only thing stored on the laptop is current stuff. When it starts getting full it gets dumped to one of the portables.
I didn't need all of that, but I was walking into Best Buy as they were putting it back on the shelf. It had what I wanted and I started drooling because it was on sale :)
Now I kinda want to install another 16gb just to say I have a total of 38, but then people would assume I have a small hootus.
Anything can do it with enough patience 
I'm only half joking, I do a lot of video editing on a decade-old laptop, no problems.
I'm using a 10 year old computer and 6 year old software so yeah, anything will work depending on how sophsticated you want the final video to be.
All video editing software that I use does not take advantage of GPU cores, so having a good video card doesn't get you any performance boost.
Video processing speed does scale almost linearly with CPU cores/power, so more is better there. Get 2gb of ram per core and you should be in good shape.
How often will you be editing? How much? If not that frequently, I'm sure waiting an extra 20 min for the video to process is no big deal. If its frequent and you can turn that 20 into 5 mins, pay the extra $$ for a good processor.
Another "you don't need the latest and greatest" opinion here. My 6.5 year old Macbook has no problem chugging through video work, and my work desktop is about the same age. The Mac is an i7, I don't even know what the processor is on the work machine. Both are running about 16 GB of RAM, and both are far, FAR more useful than the cheap laptop I picked up at Best Buy last year to do datalogging.
I'd pick up a machine that's a couple of years old and jam a bunch of RAM and maybe an SSD into it.
Thanks guys! I don’t need latest and greatest at all... essentially I just want to clean up videos for sharing with my friends and posting to YouTube. Mostly my fpv flights. Possibly and old Mac laptop is the way to go, as Keith mentioned...
My work machine is a PC, by the way. Both seem equally adept at dealing with my GoPro video, although there is the occasional file type weirdness from AIM cameras. But they’re Italian, what do you expect. The big screen real estate (actually two and a half of them) of the desktop makes it better for editing, but that’s not tied to the OS or any other attributes.
If at all possible try and get a machine that does not have a graphics card that is designated as an “M”.
dean1484 said:If at all possible try and get a machine that does not have a graphics card that is designated as an “M”.
Any laptop will have an 'M' graphics card (whether it has it in the part number or not).
It doesn't matter though, GPU isn't used for video editing.
The editing part it does not matter but as soon as you start turning them into completed video files a good graphics card matters. At least it does using the software that I use (Powerdirector) And as I said If you are rendering anything is makes a big difference.
You can get laptops with them. You need to look at the gaming laptops. I am a firm believer in buying up in computers. What is adequate now that’s is 5-6 years old will probably be junk in 2-4 years. Look at the 1-2 year old stuff as it will be relevant much longer and you don’t have the “new tech” tax.
I am actually waiting to see if nvidia is going to release a GTX version of the 2060. The RTX version is out and it is a bit better than the performance of a 1070ti but $100 less. If they release a non RTX version of that card at an even lower price With a performance of about equal to the 1070ti it would be great. Stuff that in laptops that are non gaming and we are going to see some very capable laptops in the near future for not a lot of $$$.
So, you're saying that an 8 core i7 w/ 32GB RAM and a Vega 56 (plus a GTX 950) would be overkill if I wanted to edit video?
Inquiring minds want to know.
scardeal said:So, you're saying that an 8 core i7 w/ 32GB RAM and a Vega 56 (plus a GTX 950) would be overkill if I wanted to edit video?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Not really overkill but certainly deep into the diminishing returns...
^ Absolutely not. There is no overkill for video editing.
Dean - Nvidia 20xx cards will all be RTX. The next GTX series is 11xx.
Unless you are talking about the extreme low end, almost all laptop cards are going to benchmark lower than their desktop equivalent. Just as almost all laptop processors are going to benchmark lower. Its just a heat management thing.
I don’t care what they call it as long as the price goes down and we can get something equivalent to a 1070ti for $150-$200 less than a 1070ti.
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Something to consider is going AMD for your processor. A Ryzen 2700 with its multi core processing is a fantastic value compared to the Intel 8700k.
My son and I just built identical systems with the exception of the processors. I went 8086 he went 2700. He stomps me in all multi processing tasks and there is no apparent loos in gaming or other more mundane tasks with his Machine.
Oh and there is a much better chance that when AMD releases there next iteration of the Ryzen it will be a drop in to the current motherboard that the 2700 uses. Intel tends not to be as socket friendly when they release a new chip.
This is all relevant to me. I find that I have a mavic 2 pro drone, and the output quality is....FAR beyond what my quadcore 4gig ram SSD GTX260(iirc) win7 machine can handle. It cannot play back video and it takes... well do you remember opening jpgs on a 486? It's kinda like that. Time to build a new machine.
I'm running a lenovo laptop with a 6th gen i7 quad core 2.3ghz, 8gb ram, and a amd radeon something gpu to edit "up to" 4k 100mb/s video from my mavic 2 pro. It is much happier editing 1080p footage but with proxies in premier pro it gets the job done, but really hates color grading. I'm on the lookout for a higher-spec machine but i'm not in love with the idea of dropping another grand when this one can make it through OK.
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