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Laptop for editing with Adobe Premiere & After Effects CS6

New Here ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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Hi, I'm just started a company working with young people, and I need a laptop for editing some videos (short films/music videos).

I was looking at a cheap laptop to be able to run Adobe Premiere and After Effects smoothly. I was told that this laptop would run smoothly:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-envy-m6-1178sa-15-6-laptop-17419990-pdt.html

Can anyone confirm this? The graphics card is not listed on the Adobe's website but I was told it's compatible?

Im new to this stuff so please help, thank you.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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It does not meet minimum requirements.

See What laptop to get for CS5 or CS6.

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New Here ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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Thank you for the reply. Would you be able to to tell me what part doesn't meet the requirement as I was told my the "experts" at PC WORLD that it would work, in fact they were so adamant they said they will write it on the receipt and if it fails to work they would refund all the money back to me.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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For one, it does not have the monitor resolution required, which requires at least 900 vertical resolution. It does not have two physical different SATA 7200 RPM drives.

If you want to work in the blind, without seeing the complete user interface and guessing at the option you choose on a system slower than molasses in winter, go ahead, but the people at PC WORLD do not know what they are talking about. They are from another world.

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New Here ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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Haha, thank you. I was planning on getting it today! Lucky I asked. In any case CS6 requires a very powerful machine in order to run, I was think about getting CS5 instead. Would that laptop be okay for CS5?

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Guru ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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"

2 GB DDR3 dedicated AMD Radeon HD 7670M'

If you are looking for a laptop for CS5 or CS6 then find one with an Nvidia Graphics with 1GB of ram or more. That is far more important to your editing experience on a laptop than many other components. Also you really want 12GB to 16GB of ram if it's within your budget.

Eric

ADK

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New Here ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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Okay thank you. I guess 8GB of Ram will be okay for CS5?

Would this be okay for CS6 or CS5 even?

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/toshiba-satellite-p855-307-15-6-laptop-silver-12520792-pdt.html

Many thanks for you help guys

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Community Expert ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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NO to that computer !!!

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html

Minimum 1280x900 display

Only one hard drive will not work... you MAY be able to "limp along" with a 5400rpm boot drive, but you need a 2nd 7200rpm for projects and video files

>8GB of Ram will be okay for CS5?

16Gig is MUCH better, but 8Gig would be the minimum

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New Here ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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Wow, this is a lot more complicated than I first thought. can I use an external  7200rpm hardrive for projects and video files?

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Community Expert ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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>external 7200rpm hardrive for projects and video files?

As Harm said... eSata is best for an external, but USB3 is also supposed to work (no direct experience here, I have a desktop with 3 hard drives for CS5)

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LEGEND ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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No. Still does not meet minimum requirements. Look at a laptop with:

  • i7 quad core, preferably with HT
  • 16 GB or more memory
  • nVidia GTX 650M or better video card
  • 1920 x 1080 monitor resolution
  • at least two 7200 RPM internal disks or one internal 7200 RPM SATA plus one external 7200 RPM eSATA disk. USB2 is too slow.

Did you take a look at the link I gave you in post #1?

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New Here ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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The pricing of those laptops are going way over my budget, I'm looking at something under £1000. I don't mind using CS5 instead of CS6 if it means getting a cheaper laptop. I'm only gonna be editing short videos from a Canon 600D and some visual fx such as chroma keying.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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If you have the time to finish your project (singular) by the time you reach retirement age, go ahead, but it will stress your patience. Such a system is only 80 - 120 times slower than a fast desktop with a nVidia card or even worse with an AMD card.

There is not much difference between requirements for CS5 or CS6.

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Contributor ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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If you have the time to finish your project (singular) by the time you reach retirement age, go ahead, but it will stress your patience. Such a system is only 80 - 120 times slower than a fast desktop with a nVidia card or even worse with an AMD card.

Harm is confusing editing with getting high PPBM scores, I am afraid - again.  Not all projects have 10 layers of H.264 stacked with heavy effects for two hours straight.  The vast majority of editing is simple transitions and effects with 10 minutes of YouTube encoding twice a week.

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Contributor ,
Dec 14, 2012 Dec 14, 2012

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The pricing of those laptops are going way over my budget, I'm looking at something under £1000. I don't mind using CS5 instead of CS6 if it means getting a cheaper laptop. I'm only gonna be editing short videos from a Canon 600D and some visual fx such as chroma keying.

The advice you're getting here is geared towards decent PPBM scores (benchmark Bill and Harm developed) and for professional systems - the ones used full on for 16 hours a day, where time is money.  I don't think many folks here (including Harm and Bill) take into account that occasional / light duty users do not need a high end system to smoothly run Premiere Pro.

The requirement to have two physical disks for CS6 is bogus.  Adobe does not require that.  I pointed it out to Harm but he is stubborn.

For under 1K, you can still get a decent laptop that meets most of the above requirements (but not all).  Look at Toshiba Qosmio and Lenovo IdeaPad Y58.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 15, 2012 Dec 15, 2012

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How realistic are the system requirements Adobe posts on their site?

System requirements

Windows

  • Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor with 64-bit support; Intel Core®2 Duo or AMD Phenom® II processor required for Adobe® Premiere® Pro, After Effects®, and Encore®; Intel Core i7 processor required for Adobe SpeedGradeâ„¢
  • Microsoft® Windows® 7 with Service Pack 1 (64 bit) and Windows® 8. Refer to the CS6 FAQ for more information about Windows 8 support.*
  • 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended) for 32 bit; 4GB of RAM (8GB recommended) for 64 bit
  • 14.5GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices)
  • Additional disk space required for disk cache, preview files, and other working files (10GB recommended)
  • 1280x900 display with 16-bit color and 512MB of VRAM; 1680x1050 display required, and second professionally calibrated viewing display recommended for SpeedGrade
  • OpenGL 2.0–capable system
  • Sound card compatible with ASIO protocol or Microsoft WDM/MME
  • DVD-ROM drive compatible with dual-layer DVDs (DVD+-R burner for burning DVDs; Blu-ray burner for creating Blu-ray Disc media)
  • Javaâ„¢ Runtime Environment 1.6 (included)
  • Eclipseâ„¢ 3.7 (for plug-in installation of Adobe Flash® Builder®); the following distributions are supported: Eclipse IDE for Java EE and Java Developers, Eclipse Classic, Eclipse for PHP Developers
  • QuickTime 7.6.6 software required for QuickTime features, multimedia, and HTML5 media playback
  • Dedicated GPU card required for SpeedGrade (for optimal performance in SpeedGrade and for GPU-accelerated features in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects: NVIDIA Quadro 4000, 5000, or 6000 or other Adobe-certified GPU card with at least 1GB of VRAM recommended); visit www.adobe.com/products/premiere/extend.html for supported cards
  • Optional: Tangent CP200 family or Tangent Wave control surface for SpeedGrade
  • Optional: For SDI output, NVIDIA Quadro SDI Output card required for SpeedGrade
  • Optional: 7200 RPM hard drive (multiple fast disk drives, preferably RAID 0 configured, recommended) for video products
  • This software will not operate without activation. Broadband Internet connection and registration are required for software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services.† Phone activation is not available.

You have to be from another world to believe these requirements. Note the last optional statement. Up to and including CS4 this stated:

Dedicated 7200 RPM hard drive (multiple fast disk drives, preferably RAID 0 configured) for video products.

Nobody in his right mind believes that system requirements get lower over time. It is purely a marketing lie to artificially lure prospective buyers.

The requirement to have two physical disks for CS6 is bogus.

If anything is bogus, it is the system requirements from Adobe and only fools would try to use a system with these minimum requirements, like this:

Pentium 4 with 4 GB of RAM, 24.5 GB of hard disk space is enough according to them.

Harm is confusing editing with getting high PPBM scores, I am afraid - again.  Not all projects have 10 layers of H.264 stacked with heavy effects for two hours straight.  The vast majority of editing is simple transitions and effects with 10 minutes of YouTube encoding twice a week.

Wrong assumption. I was thinking of a simple DV timeline with one single track. And however much you dislike the PPBM benchmark, it is the only available tool to show how well a system is setup and in balance. Question: Is your dislike of the benchmark based on the fact that your favorite HP Z820 does not do well?

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Contributor ,
Dec 15, 2012 Dec 15, 2012

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It is purely a marketing lie to artificially lure prospective buyers.

And that is a unfounded personal perspective of yours, Harm.  Someone editing 25Mbs DV files and outputting them to YouTube - can work on a $500 i3 laptop with a single 5400rpm drive just fine.

It's a great thing Adobe doesn't let you write their system recommendations.   It's really not a great thing you've taken that job upon yourself though.

The real recommendation is (and had always been): minimum system requirements are a moving target and depend on both the application's demands (e.g. 64-bit only) and those of the workflow.

Insisting that two physical drives is a minimum requirement without knowing the demands of the wokflow is utter insanity.

Wrong assumption. I was thinking of a simple DV timeline with one single track. And however much you dislike the PPBM benchmark, it is the only available tool to show how well a system is setup and in balance. Question: Is your dislike of the benchmark based on the fact that your favorite HP Z820 does not do well?

  1. I don't dislike the benchmark, I dislike the frenetic religious fervor associated with it, that is so prevalent on this forum.
  2. I have no clue how Z820 does on PPBM - I am married to neither, and find your jab rather strange given that Z820's core components (CPUs, memory, GPUs, hard drives) don't vary from any other C602 platform, sans overclocking.
  3. You need a Core i7 CPU, 16GB RAM and two 7200rpm drives for a simple 1-track DV timeline?  Insanity.  Harm, do you even remember the year DV camcorders and FireWire cards started shipping?  (Hint: it wasn't in this millennium.)

[Personal comment deleted]

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LEGEND ,
Dec 15, 2012 Dec 15, 2012

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And that is a unfounded personal perspective of yours, Harm.

Again a wrong assumption. Take a simple 3 hour DV single track timeline on a single disk 5400 RPM system, way faster in CPU than a Pentium 4, in contrast to a fast system and the export time is around 12,600 seconds on a single 5400 RPM disk and around 20 seconds on a fast system. That is a whopping 630 times slower. If you call that unfounded, go ahead, but I have run various editing projects on three different machines, not benchmark projects, but real life editing projects and the differences are huge between what Adobe calls minimum requirements (even when you surpass them) and what I call practical minimum requirements.

Now who is being stubborn?

Insisting that two physical drives is a minimum requirement without knowing the demands of the wokflow is utter insanity.

Someone editing 25Mbs DV files and outputting them to YouTube - can work on a $500 i3 laptop with a single 5400rpm drive just fine.

Call me insane, but when you tell people that a 630 times slower workflow is 'just fine', maybe you ought to reconsider that stance.

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Contributor ,
Dec 15, 2012 Dec 15, 2012

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Again a wrong assumption. Take a simple 3 hour DV single track timeline on a single disk 5400 RPM system, way faster in CPU than a Pentium 4, in contrast to a fast system and the export time is around 12,600 seconds on a single 5400 RPM disk and around 20 seconds on a fast system. That is a whopping 630 times slower.

Harm, you export 3-hour DV timelines all day long? I am sorry.   I'd rather you edit.

On top of that, you somehow think exporting 3-hour DV timelines is a major part of the majority of workflows?  Touche.

And yes, I'd be insane to export a 3-hour timeline to the same drive, especially if it's a 5400rpm one.  As insane as demanding everybody has two disks regardless of the type of editing they do.

Which part of, "practical minimum system requirements depend on the type of editing and workflow demands" do you find questionable?

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LEGEND ,
Dec 16, 2012 Dec 16, 2012

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What?

And yes, I'd be insane to export a 3-hour timeline to the same drive, especially if it's a 5400rpm one.

In your previous post you said:

Someone editing 25Mbs DV files and outputting them to YouTube - can work on a $500 i3 laptop with a single 5400rpm drive just fine.

I can't find any logic in your statements. On the one hand you can work just fine on a single 5400 rpm drive, but you have to be insane to do that. Encoding 12 minutes DV material to YouTube on a single 5400rpm drive, that surpasses Adobe minimum requirements, takes around 144 HOURS (6 days), at least after 2 hours of encoding it shows still 182 hours to go. On a fast system this takes around 8 minutes with the slow approach using the queue, and around 96 seconds with direct export. And the best part of it is that you can't remove the laptop from the wall outlet during those 6 days of encoding, thereby making the portability of a laptop a non-issue.

That is only 1,080 times slower and even more when using Direct Export on a fast system, more than 5,000 times slower. IMO you have to be insane to advise people to adhere to or look at the minimum requirements Adobe publishes. I have always said the minimum requirements allow you a problem-free installation of the program, and for that purpose a single drive with at least 24.5 GB free space is sufficient, even if it is a 5400 or 4800 drive. Adobe does not mention a minimum speed.

If you want more than just INSTALLING the program and you want to USE it, then the minimum requirements are absolutely ridiculous for PR, AME and AE.

Jim was right that often you defy simple logic.

Exporting a 3 hour timeline or a 10 minute timeline makes no difference in performance. A fast system is still around 630 times faster on DV Export. On exporting DV to YouTube a fast system is still more than 1,000 times faster than a notebook that exceeds Adobe minimum requirements.

With these facts established, I can not understand why you are so stubborn in calling a two disk practical requirement 'bogus' and at the same time say it is 'just fine' to edit with a single disk, but you have to be insane to use only a single disk.

There is no logic at all in your statements, at least I cannot discern it. The only thing I see is a strict adherence to the letter of the law, in this case Adobe's law.

I hope that these practical tests, including exporting DV to YouTube opens your eyes to the utterly unrealistic marketing tricks by Adobe.

You know I often defend Adobe, but here they have screwed up so majorly with very misleading information that it ultimately results in bad feelings about the company. On the longer term it is very destructive. If we forget about OE in the questions asked here, but look only at people very disappointed with their systems performance, hiccups, jitters, choppy playback and issues like that, it is often caused by people believing the Adobe minimum requirements and making their purchasing decision based on these and ending up with a system that just is not capable of what they see in demonstrations, on-line video's and training movies. That is not good.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 16, 2012 Dec 16, 2012

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There's a lot of twisting of other people's words going on here, and it needs to stop.  There's a lot of unverified (non-peer-reviewed) information being tossed around as facts, and there are significantly skewed perspectives on both sides of the issue.

Premiere Pro's price, especially with a cloud subscription, is no longer a barrier to casual hobbyists and novices.  We here can expect that the cross-section of users will range from complete beginners to extremely capable experts.  Some of the former type of user may not be willing to spend a ton of money on a higher-end system, and will be content to make due with lower-spec computers.  They should be warned, gently, that they may find the editing experience to be less than ideal.  But less-than-ideal is a very different thing than completely unacceptable.

The minimum requirements listed by Adobe will work for certain types of footage and can meet certain editor's needs.  If an individual with no deadlines, no bosses and no income riding on the outcome of an editing session with Premiere Pro is willing to wait overnight or until the folowing day for an export to complete, then so be it.  If they come here to complain about how long it takes, or how they only get a few seconds of smooth playback in the timeline, then we can let them know that the solution involves cost -- either time or money, and sometimes both.

Until that time, however, posting about system requirements that do not apply to everyone, and insisting that those requirements be met regardless of the user's real needs, doesn't help at all.  Conversely, there are serious limits to a low-end system that new users need to take into account before purchasing hardware.

Jeff

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LEGEND ,
Jan 02, 2013 Jan 02, 2013

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Jeff,

We all have different levels of "acceptability". For me, even though I am a casual user with no deadlines and no income, taking overnight to export several hours worth of single-layered HD (1080i/p) video (or one to two hours worth of multi-layered HD video) is tolerable - but waiting overnight to export a few seconds or even a few minutes worth of single-layered SD (480i) video is clearly unacceptable - and even taking overnight to export even a few minutes of single-layered HD video would have left me frustrated. On a system with such extremely sluggish levels of performance, I would not run or even install Premiere Pro CS6 at all.

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LEGEND ,
Jan 03, 2013 Jan 03, 2013

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but waiting overnight to export a few seconds or even a few minutes worth of single-layered SD (480i) video is clearly unacceptable

Even my old P4 with Windows XP and 2 GB of RAM performed a lot better than that.  I edited DV and SD MPEG2 on it for years. 

taking overnight to export several hours worth of single-layered HD (1080i/p) video (or one to two hours worth of multi-layered HD video) is tolerable

Conversely, my current Dual Xeon system with a 4-disc RAID0 media drive would have a tough time finishing those tasks in less than "overnight".  And I consider its performance much better than "tolerable".

There is a huge performance gap between your two scenarios, and just about every existing device with a CPU (including my iPhone!) will be able to work and perform somewhere in between. 

Jeff

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Contributor ,
Dec 16, 2012 Dec 16, 2012

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... so stubborn...

That is my middle name.

Second what Jeff said; people (and their performance needs) have different tolerance levels to what's slow.  For someone doing 10 minute cut-only videos with some titles and uploading them on YouTube once a week - almost anything is fast enough, and Adobe's minimum requirements will do.  For someone doing 4K music videos on tight deadlines, no computer is fast enough.

It's really not about the rpm and the number of disks, as computers aren't socks, there isn't "one size fits all".  It's about what would work for that specific person.  It makes sense to ask what they are trying to do before tossing "two drives are a must", PPBM scores and export times around.

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Guide ,
Dec 15, 2012 Dec 15, 2012

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Alex Gerulaitis wrote:

 

I have no clue how Z820 does on PPBM - I am married to neither, and find your jab rather strange given that Z820's core components (CPUs, memory, GPUs, hard drives) don't vary from any other C602 platform, sans overclocking. 

Alex,

Your statements often defy simple logic:

  • Your web site is advertising two variants of Z820 for sale (approx. $5k for single 2.3GHz CPU, approx $9k for dual 2GHz CPU), however you state you are not married to HP's Z820 - Hmmmmmmm...
  • You state that, "The vast majority of editing is simple transitions and effects with 10 minutes of YouTube encoding twice a week", and your web site's Entry Level System is over $4k. - Hmmmmmmm...
  • You have the time to post at this forum, you work for a company that sells video editing solutions, yet you claim to "have no clue" how a Z820 does on PPBM5, which would take less than one hour of your time - Hmmmmmm...

Jim

(a forum participant that has gained so much from this forum and PPBM5 and wishes to pay it forward when I feel that I can assist others here)

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