Korean Job Discussion Forums

[suprd3vil]

My boy friend is a YouTube partner (SC2 videos) and has asked me to take over editing for him recently. I've done amateur video editing on both PCs and on Macs the past. As the only two classes I've taken on the subject were taught on Mac computers I've decided to invest in a new MacBook Pro.
In looking at the apple site I've become completely lost. I have no idea how heavily video edition stresses the video card and thus no idea where to wisely invest my money.
I'm looking a the 15" MacBook Pro. I was thinking of getting the lower end version and upgrading the screen resolution, HD speed (5400 to 7200) and getting iWork and finish cut express 4 added on.
All reports are pretty conflicting on the subject

tl;dr; I want to buy a MacBook Pro 15" to edit videos for YouTube but I don't know what I should put my money into.

[red_devil]

[Chokse]

Any Apple computer currently being sold will have more than enough horsepower to do the kind of video editing you want to do.

However, you do need to keep in mind that video editing requires a great amount of hard drive space and is much easier to do on a larger screen.

So, I would recommend against a MacBook Air because of the lack of hard drive (flash memory) space. You might also want to avoid the 13 inch Mac laptops because of the small screen size, unless you plan to do most of the editing while hooked up to a monitor.

You should be OK with a 15 inch MBP as long as you have at least 500GB of hard drive space. Don't buy any hard drive or memory upgrades from Apple. Get them yourself and install them your self. It's easy and costs at least half of what Apple will charge.

[sheriffadam]

I'd go for a decent, fast external HDD over an internal upgrade. ESata or USB3 Or whatever the best spec mac come with.

15" screen size would be my choice, more is better, but anything over 15" is a lot to carry around. get a 24" display at home to connect it to.

[ThingsComeAround]

sc2 videos?

wow! can I help? I own a mac

[zhanknight]

Don't listen to anyone who tells you that the graphics card is important for video editing. It is NOT, unless you are doing GPU rendering, which you won't be with a Macbook Pro.

Most important are the CPU and the hard drive.

Rendering is the most time consuming, intense part of video editing. Rendering is a long process wherein the CPU makes tons of calculations. If you are editing with software that does not support multiple threads, you want the fastest dual core CPU you can get. If you are editing with something that does support multiple threads (FCP, Premiere, Etc) then you want a CPU with many cores, even if it's a bit slower. 4 cores @ 1.5 is better than 2 @ 2.0Ghz in that case.

After that, your biggest concern is the hard drive. You want a high spindle speed, 7200 RPM is what you're shooting for in a laptop. Lots of space is great. If you can - you want two fast drives so that you don't saturate one with read/write operations during rendering.

The ram in any of the current Macbooks will be fine, even if you don't bump it up past the standard 4 gig.

Other considerations: It sucks to edit video on a small screen, so maybe consider the larger versions or an external monitor.

Holy crap, I typed a lot. I do lots of video editing and have been a hardware guy for a long time. I actually have a new project uploading right now on our youtube channel - youtube.com/evannrachel - some tilt shift time lapse stuff around Seoul.

tl;dr: The current 15" MBP would be fine, even if you don't change anything. You will see marked improvement from it if you swap the default 5400RPM drive for a 7200RPM drive. A second drive, externally attached via that fancy new thunderbolt port might come in handy but isn't necessary.

Personally though - I'd take a machine from Sager with twice the horsepower for way less cash and run Premiere on it.

Edit!** What's his youtube channel? I'll go subscribe to it.

[suprd3vil]

Wow! You guys are amazing! Thank you so much~! I put in the order today, 15 MBP with the upgrade to the HD and screen.

His youtube channel is ArtosisTV ( Artosis.tv )

I'm really excited to start working on some stuff!

Thanks again!

[zhanknight]