Suggestions for laptop on the road to edit vids

Baldbiker

Baldbiker

L Plate Member
I may not be able to upload vids on the road too well when on my big trips, but I'm looking at laptops that I could spend the evenings in the hotel room and work on my editing during the journey. This would also free up SD cards and save a ton of work when I get home. The laptop needs to be small enough to fit in the top box, and powerful enough to have no trouble editing and processing 1080p video files. I currently use my home PC for this which is an intel i7 @ 3.6 Ghz with 32 gigs ram accompanied by a 24 gig Nvidia video card.

I can't find anything like that for under $1000 CAD. All I'm seeing is 4 to 8 gigs ram and much slower processors. I'm concerned I'm going to have trouble editing with these. Can anyone recommend or have any suggestions on a laptop to look at that can do the job?
 
You could consider the Macbook air with M1 processor - yes, specs are not same, but check some reviews.

Ofcourse you might want to also get a external SSD storage with Thunderbolt connector, as Mac internal storage is limited and adds quite a bit to the cost.
 
Does your editing program render using video card of cpu? I think that is the number one thing to target, when doing the research. The other specs can lag slightly behind, if budget is an issue.
I have been thinking about doing short clips on trips, but my case can only fit 10" latptop. Good luck finding one like that at all nowdays. Luckily I have one age old netbook, I can still use at least for transferring the data on to backup hardrive.
 
" intel i7 @ 3.6 Ghz with 32 gigs ram"

Quick food for thought: Remember that those numbers are redundant. Like saying what the top speed or max horsepower or torque of a motorcycle is - so what? How fast does it make those speeds, at what RPM does it make that torque or horsepower. Likewise, with processors, every generation improves over the next, so the latest processor at 3.6ghz versus a processor at 3.6 ghz from 4 years ago isn't a fair fight, and RAM cards have different speeds as well. Numbers upon numbers but the details make all the difference.

One tip: If you're worried about memory cards and you're going to bring a laptop with you anyway, bring an external hard drive. You can get a 5 TB ssd for $120. Then you can copy all of your footage off your sd cards and onto the external hard drive.

I have 130 completed videos on my external hard drive, half of them or more are at 4k quality, and it's barely 2 tb.
 
Wouldn't iPad be very limited on storage (or very expensive to get one with more storage) and also have lightning port only, which is rather slow to use external storage?

EDIT: Actually storage might be such an big issue when dealing with 1080p as asked in first post... I was considering 4K high-bandwidth footage.
 
I got a new iPad Air strictly for editing vids. I only do 4K, it renders in real time and never crashes. My pc took overnight to render a 10 minute vid if it didn’t crash. PC software is always several hundred dollars, lumafusion app was $30cdn. Looking at my latest vids, I admit I have less tricky editing happening than before. And I also now make a point to record better. But still, the iPad renders 4K in real time. Lots of info on lumafusion on YouTube, have a look.
 
HippoDrone said:
I know several motovloggers who use either an ipad or Android tablet to edit and upload videos, be small and should offer good performance.
Click to expand...
Hmm. I have an 8" Android tablet now, but didn't think it could handle editing these vids. Maybe I should give it a try and see if it can handle it. If it can, I could save the finished vids onto a separate drive.
 
Adrian said:
What do you mean by "renders 4k in real time" ?
Click to expand...
It’ll render the final version of the edited video in approximately the same time as the length of the video. In other words, render a 10 min video in about 10 minutes, and often quicker. It depends on how complicated the video is.
 
Well it was a thought, but I checked out my tablet. It doesn't have any USB ports so transferring data to and from SD cards would be a pain. I'm just not Guru enough for all this. I'm probably better off just recording and labelling the SD cards as I go and leaving all the editing until I get home. Other than that, I'll just enjoy the ride.
 
Baldbiker said:
Well it was a thought, but I checked out my tablet. It doesn't have any USB ports so transferring data to and from SD cards would be a pain. I'm just not Guru enough for all this. I'm probably better off just recording and labelling the SD cards as I go and leaving all the editing until I get home. Other than that, I'll just enjoy the ride.
Click to expand...

Baldbiker - If you go back to my tip here, you don't need multiple sd cards.

Suggestions for laptop on the road to edit vids

I may not be able to upload vids on the road too well when on my big trips, but I'm looking at laptops that I could spend the evenings in the hotel room and work on my editing during the journey. This would also free up SD cards and save a ton of work when I get home. The laptop needs to be...
motovlog.com

You can use your cell phone as a go-between your SD card and an external hard drive.

SD card out of camera and into phone
Adapter between your phone an external disk drive
Move files from SD card to external hard drive
SD card out of phone back into device
 
If your phone doesn't have a built in SD card slot (non expandable phone), then you'll need an adapter like this:

Whether or not your phone is expandable you'll need something like this to plug your external hard drive into your phone:


Then you've essentially turned your phone into a laptop for the purpose of emptying you sd cards every day.

Otherwise who knows how many sd cards you'll end up having, needing, using, and losing.

I am cheap. This is cheaper lol.
 
On road trips I went from a beast of a laptop to using my Samsung Note 8 and sometimes a Samsung Tablet. Both have USB-C and there are USB hubs where I can hook up an external drive.

The Note 8 has a docking station with HDMI out for hooking into the hotel room TV, and two USB ports. One USB port I use for a wireless keyboard or mouse and the SSD is in the other.

I use Cyberlink PowerDirector on both devices.

Does not take up much space. Works for me.
 
Are you going to be fully editing a finished vlog or are you just going to be rough cutting out footage that won't be used?

A cheap laptop with basic editting software will chop out dead footage and also enable you to arrange and name into folders and files for easy reference later
 
I've been doing more editing from my iPad Pro just to get used to it. Takes up a lot less space than a high power laptop. I thought about buying one, but testd out packing my wife's MSI, and even as small as it feels when using it, it gets VERY big when on the bike.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Top Posters Past 30 days

Winners Video

Website Supported by Ipswich SEO

Latest posts

Back
Top