And if your income depends on such work, make it a NAS with RAID for data redundancy and disaster recovery (opens in new tab). And if you value your work, we recommend you add a Network Attached Storage ( NAS (opens in new tab)) unit for local backup purposes. If you are on a budget, a good rule of thumb is to keep the internal storage modest and purchase the largest external HDD (opens in new tab) or flash drive (opens in new tab)that you can buy. We present you options from a wide range of prices.
Having a secondary, old-fashioned spinning disc hard disk drive ( HDD (opens in new tab)) as a secondary storage medium for your final work exports is a huge bonus, so we focused on systems that either come with 1TB or more of secondary storage or which can be easily expanded with additional HDDs internally. Luckily, most systems nowadays come with SSDs to quickly load the operating system and applications. Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve (opens in new tab) are optimised to offload encoding from the main CPU to the video card´s GPU.įast storage is also essential. A fast discrete GPU -if available- will also help as once you get past simple chopping of footage and start involving transitions, overlays and other fancy effects. To work with heavyweight video editors like Adobe Premiere (opens in new tab) you will need 16GB of RAM to plod away comfortably, although technically it can run with just eight.
How we selected the best video editing PC
This has widened the options from full size workstations (opens in new tab) to compact offerings with fewer internal storage bays. Since speedy USB 3.2 ports are ubiquitous, using an external disk for final work storage is no longer as much of a pain as it once was. The operating system should have a solid state drive ( SSD (opens in new tab)) so the operating system and applications load and run quickly. Video editing apps are also heavyweight in terms of memory usage, so the more the better.
Most video editing software depends on the CPU multiple cores and with powerful graphics are necessary to edit effectively. Those with extreme portability needs or little desk space have an option from Minisforum.
From the available options we would suggest having a PC from HP, or desktop workstation from Lenovo, or systems from Dell, ASUS, or an Apple all-in-one.
While many technologists may prefer to build their own (opens in new tab) system with high-end processors from AMD (opens in new tab) and Intel (opens in new tab), the busy worker and professional will enjoy purchasing a plug and play solution that just works from minute one, with technical support and overall system warranty. In terms of power, you’re going to need a processor (opens in new tab) with solid multi-core performance since you’ll be doing some complex editing, lots of speedy RAM (opens in new tab), and, of course, a discrete graphics card (opens in new tab) that can function at the resolutions you’re hoping to work in. The more performance your computer is capable of, the faster you’ll be able to work and render in your video editing software (opens in new tab) of choice. The longer your project is and the higher the resolution you’re working in, the more robust those components need to be. That means that whatever PC (opens in new tab) you end up with has to have some pretty powerful internals.