We found the MacBook Pro’s display to be sharp, with great contrast, and it was generally pleasant to look at for extended periods of time. A 1 TB drive gives your system a bit more headroom and allows you to store a few more projects at a time.

The smallest drive we recommend is 500 GB, but we suggest that option only if you’re already archiving video projects on external hard drives or a network-attached storage system. Storage: Most new laptops use fast NVMe drives, so you’re just shopping for how much storage you need.However, if your projects contain dozens of gigabytes of video, you should upgrade to 32 GB. Memory: On both Windows and Mac laptops, we recommend a baseline 16 GB of RAM for photo and video work.Even higher-end GPUs tend to ship in gaming laptops that are typically heavier, bulkier, and louder than the ultrabooks we consider for this guide. Laptops with Nvidia’s latest RTX line of graphics cards have become cheaper and easier to find, so in our latest round we tested laptops with RTX 3050 to RTX 3060 Ti graphics. Since 2020, creative-software giant Adobe has worked to expand how GPUs can speed up editing tasks in its Premiere video-editing software, making exports up to five times faster than in previous versions of the software. Graphics card: Video editors and those who work in motion graphics should pay special attention to a system’s graphics card, or GPU.And if you’re buying a Mac, choose a system that uses an M2, M1 Pro, or M1 Max chip, as those are two of Apple’s newest custom-built processors.

If you’re looking at AMD, seek out processors with the Ryzen 5000 or 6000 designation. For Intel, we recommend the latest, 11th or 12th generation of the Core i7 chip. Windows users have to choose between a processor from Intel or one from AMD. Processor: Also referred to as the CPU, the processor is the most important component of any editing laptop.

Best video editor for laptop