BADLY need help choosing a suitable laptop for 1080p editing...

[Subscriber]

Hey guys,

I am in the market to purchase a laptop for 1080p editing and have been reading mountains of information over the last few days in relation to what the minimum requirements of a laptop are that I need to be able to do so, and honestly my brain is hurting from trying to sieve through all the info on processors, their cores and threads, graphic cards, hardrives and clock speeds, RAM, ect..I just can`t wrap my head around what the MINIMIM requirements are for 1080p editing on a laptop...

Could anyone be of assistance in this with some general guidance? It would be greatly appreciated.

In particular I am wondering:

1. Would a Ryzen 5 processor be sufficient or do I need to go to Ryzen 7?
2. Do I need a dedicated graphics card?
3. Is 128 GB SSD sufficient or do I need more storage? How much GB does 1080p editing use in storage?
4. Will 8GB RAM be sufficient or do I need to go to 16GB?

Note. I will only be looking to cut and drag clips together with some voice over commentary and put some music on top with Wondershare Filmora 9 video editor. I do not have any intention of using the Adobe suite, Final Cut Pro, Divinci Resolve or anything similar and will not be editing in 4K ever. The projects I do are very straight forward and basic with 1080p video.

Thanks for any advice..

[TimStannard]

I don't know Filmora but that spec sounds seriously underpowered.
The SSD at 128 is big enough for operating system and software. Yes there's room for some footage but very little.
It's not possible to say how much space 1080Pfootage takes without knowing the codec you uses. Typically lower end cameras shoot with very highly compressed footage, which means much more footage per GB.
Unfortunately this has to be decompressed by the computer so it requires far more power.
One common solution for people working on laptops is tio uise an externa hard drive for footage.

[Marc Peters]

I can edit 1080p AVCHD footage on a late 2013 MacBook pro with an onboard graphic card, intel i7 and 8GB ram. As Tim says, space (and just as importantly the speed of harddrive) is critical. For the last 5+ years I've edited all my footage using external SSDs. In summary, a second hand laptop with an i7, 8GB ram and SSDs will do for you.