Hi guys My daughter needs a laptop for video editing using davinci resolve for d'log m footage, not too expensive, thank you
as much as it pains me - probably looking at a macbook neo, esp given apple's student discounts tend to be quite generous.
Sky Mobile do laptops on contracts. The MacBook Air M2 16GB / 256GB is a ridiculously low £14pm on a 3 year swap 4 year own plan. And the M4 Air was I think £19. They have the Neo as well but even the M2 kicks its arse.
Those Sky deals are certainly interesting, just be sure to have a look at the total payment details. The M2 macbook air's a great deal, some of the other 'interest free' deals are anything but.
Less so on mac but most laptops at the cheap [~£500] end will struggle in one way or other. Ultimately though it depends on the videos being edited.
Yeah tbh it will hobble it. The M2 16GB on Sky and the M4 which is 16GB as standard would be much better and while the repayment is much longer at those insanely low monthlies, Sky haven’t given a **** about my bad credit as long as I keep paying the bill so there’s that…!!
I would get one with as high a capacity SSD as possible, I don't think 256gb is enough. When you're editing the video, resolve caches the project files on the drive in addition to them being saved to the drive already. My average bit-tech video would be ~100GB of cached files, if I ran out of space on the SSD it would start caching on my HDD and become an absolute crawl fest. If there is no other drive god knows how slow it would get.
Yeah but at the cheap end being hobbled in one way or other is just a fact of life... it's about which shortcomings and corner cutting affects/annoys you the least... Dabbling with UE has me feeling this too. Ultimately - You buy the best you can afford on the day. Everything is an exercise in compromise, especially right now... it's largely about which shortcomings and corner cutting annoys you the least. For the use case you've described and the budget you've implied - it's almost certainly going to be some form of mac. If portability isn't a concern and you're willing to factor in a monitor - don't discount the mac mini either.
Need a budget really to find the best route which might still be a mac, It all depends on the scope of the video editing too, I used to do multiple 4k streams, whilst the machine could be low end, the storage and ram could not.
For buying outright, the MacBook Neo is extremely hard to argue with, especially factoring in the student discount. For £500, I honestly don’t think you’ll find anything else that competes with the build quality & performance. Yes the RAM is limited, but macOS copes with that far better than Windows. The much bigger bottleneck for video editing is the storage and how complex the scenes are. Rendering out the final video is pretty much always a “set it and forget it” task. If it takes a bit longer because of lower RAM (or the CPU throttling due to temperature) then it just means you need to leave it alone for longer. Lower RAM will make it more difficult for complex scenes, lots of layers/effects, After Effects motion graphics, etc. But slower network or USB storage is even more crippling for a video editing workflow. The Neo is about equivalent to the chip in an M1 Air, and plenty of people do even 4K editing on those machines. Either way, it beats the crap out of any Intel-based Mac. An extra £100 for the 512GB storage model would be preferable. The 256GB model would be workable, but if she’s dealing with a lot of 4K footage she’ll really struggle, and she’d need to be diligent about offloading unneeded footage to some kind of external storage, be that USB or NAS. Ideally you’d want external storage for backup purposes anyway, but how far you take that - a full “3-2-1” solution or just a simple external USB drive - depends on how critical it is to not lose any footage. Something like iCloud or InsertCloudStorageServiceHere is a bare minimum, IMO. If, on the other hand, you’re going to go for something on a monthly payment scheme, your options are obviously a lot wider. Though I would still thoroughly recommend a MacBook, probably M3 or better and 16GB RAM at the bare minimum. It’s something of a cliche that Macs are preferred for “creative work”, but I’d still argue that they have a lot going for them: build quality, longevity, software support. And if she wants to take this even further, having a Mac opens up the option of buying Final Cut Pro at some point.
I have a laptop I need to ship on that might be ideal for this. https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.php?threads/asus-rog-zephyrus-g14.388376/
