How to buy a laptop for video editing

This series of articles explains how to buy a laptop that is suitable for video editing, and it’s based on practical experience because I often edit my videos on a laptop.

It isn’t a good idea to buy a laptop for video editing and then find that you’ve made an expensive mistake because it can’t handle the large amount of data transfer that this usually involves.

The specifics how to buy a laptop for video editing

I describe the laptop that I use and I also describe the laptop’s specification, ie. how much memory it has, what processor speed it has, what size hard disk it has, and the operating system, etc.
I also describe the video editing software that I use with the laptop, so that you’ll know exactly how this particular video editing software performs with this particular specification of laptop.
This should give you a pretty good idea of how to buy the right kind of laptop for video editing and how to buy the right kind of video editing software for it.

A screenshot of a video editing timeline edited on a laptop

To give you an example of the large amount of data transfer that is involved with video editing, why not take a look at the screenshot below?
It’s a screenshot of the timeline that I created for my short film ‘A Christian Civilisation.’
In reality, this is a pretty extreme example of a timeline for a short film because there are quite a few scenes and quite a lot of other media on the timeline.
This media includes the video clips sometimes called ‘footage’ that I finally decided to use (after editing,) sound effects, background music, ‘stills’ (static images or photos.) text, and a voiceover, or speech.

This is an extreme but useful example of video editing on a laptop

Although it’s a pretty extreme example of a timeline for a short film this is actually pretty useful to someone who is considering buying a laptop for video editing. In fact it’s more useful than a screenshot of a timeline that doesn’t have much media on it.
It means that I’ve asked my laptop to do more than I probably should have asked it to do.

How to buy a laptop that has just about the right specification for video editing

This means that if you are planning to buy a laptop for video editing, and if your videos are not as complicated as the video on this timeline, you won’t be asking your laptop to do as much video editing I ask my laptop to do.
This in turn means that you can safely consider buying a laptop that has the same or similar specification as my laptop.
You’ll be safe because you won’t be asking it to do as much work.