I've gotten into video editing. I have been using my Asus laptop. It's a $250 cheap one, with a Celron 2.16Ghz, and 4 gig of ram. It's using integrated graphics processing. It's running Windows 8.1. Powerhouse it is not. Works fine for internet and word processing but it's coming up lacking at editing video.
It runs Movie Maker just fine, but slowly. I want to upgrade to better software, but the couple I have downloaded to try, won't run without locking up or won't playback video smoothly. The software specs say it should run, but it isn't running right.
Where am I coming up short?
Will throwing another 4 gig of memory in the Asus help, or is it time to buy another computer? I'm afraid it's the processing power that's killing it or the lack of proper graphics card. Can you upgrade the processor or graphics in a laptop? Or is that a waste of time and money.
If it's time to upgrade, how much processing power and memory do I really need. Do I need more graphics, processor, memory, or all three. Top of the line is out, I'm not spending that kind of money, but something in the $500-$700 range would be doable. There are so many core something processors on the market now, I don't even know where to start.
Will a desktop be better than a laptop or just cheaper?
Thanks for any information.
Most laptops you can really only upgrade the ram, which thankfully is dirt cheap these days compared to what it was even 5 years ago.
From my limited understanding, a better graphics card would do more than ram or processor upgrades would for video editing, but I'm still very new to editing myself.
A cheap desktop with a middle of the road graphics card would do wonders(unless a professional comes in telling me I'm wrong).
Fwiw, the $800 Lenovo I bought 2 years ago runs movie maker just fine, only upgrade I've done was doubling the ram hoping for slightly better gaming performance. Haven't even put in an SSD yet. I haven't been shopping lately, but I'd guess spec wise it's down into the $500 range these days, it's just lacking an optical drive which may or may not be a problem.
Specs of mine:
2gb nvidia graphics card.
16gb ram up from 8 new
3.1ghz i5 Intel processor.
1tb 7200rpm hard drive
I remember you mentioning making family videos and stuff, you'd probably want a dvd burner to make sharing easier, but external ones are pretty fast and inexpensive these days if you want to stay with a cheap laptop instead of a desk top.
Edit: make sure you have video preview or live preview(whatever is called) shut off, that will really slow things down.
For processing videos, ironically, a video card doesn't really do anything (unless high-end rendering software).
A quick googling shows Movie Maker is multi-threaded. So you want A) a bunch of cores, B) fast ones, and C) 2gigs of Ram per core. A SSD would help as well.
A desktop would be significantly better. It will have far less thermal issues so won't end up throttling itself. On top of that, bus speeds and cores speeds are much higher on desktop processors.
If you are willing to build it yourself, I you can build a pretty beastly setup for that price. Look for the current gen i5 or i7, don't pay extra for a K series unless you want to overclock.
Upgrading the laptop = waste.
In reply to ProDarwin:
I built a pretty Burly gaming rig for about $700 from scratch and that included a $200 graphics card. I have 8 cores and 16gb of ram. Follow prodarwin's suggestions. I bet if you ask here for a parts list, someone would help you get good stuff.
Darwin's right, a graphics card does little for video editing. You need a decent multicore processor with a large cache, plus plenty of RAM. A SSD will help when loading things into and out of RAM.
A Celeron is a dated design, knee-capped by a lack of cache amongst other cost-cutting sacrifices. An I5 or I7 would really wake it up, and you need plenty of RAM to feed the beast.
Sending you a PM.
That's so odd. Bitcoin mining, gaming (duh), upscaling output, even compiling are all GPU intensive, I'm kind of surprised to learn that won't help much with video editing. Have to keep that in mind when I build my next desktop that I'm slowly acquiring pieces for.
GPUs are really good at certain types of math, particularly vector and matrix calculations, and work best with data streams for highly parallel applications. They're also tricky to program for. The more professional video editing programs will use OpenCL or CUDA and will benefit from a snappy GPU. I don't believe Movie Maker has the capability - hence it relies on processor horsepower exclusively.
RevRico wrote:
That's so odd. Bitcoin mining, gaming (duh), upscaling output, even compiling are all GPU intensive, I'm kind of surprised to learn that won't help much with video editing. Have to keep that in mind when I build my next desktop that I'm slowly acquiring pieces for.
It seems counter-intuitive but if you think of a movie as a very large pile of single images when editing... you are really talking processing power and memory to buffer and write each frame.
I use Movie Maker and, on my laptop, it is FAR slower than it ever was on my desktop, despite theoretically better specs.
The cores/multithreaded aspect is probably why.
If you play the used game right, you can find older dual-CPU (8+ total cores) workstations within your budget.
