Help with a video editor

[gjdjud]

Just bought a new laptop. Nothing too fancy but wanted a video editor to practice editing some videos for our trip next year. I don’t want anything to complicated. I loved IMovie for it’s simplicity. I’ve tried Lightworks but it’s really slow on my laptop which is a shame as it seems easy to edit clips. Shotcut I can’t even watch the clips as it freezes. Cyber link powerdirector seems the best so far but hoping someone can guide me in another direction. Hoping it’s not the new laptop not powerful enough It was a mid range priced HP.

[YorkshireT]

Originally Posted by gjdjud

Just bought a new laptop. Nothing too fancy but wanted a video editor to practice editing some videos for our trip next year. I don’t want anything to complicated. I loved IMovie for it’s simplicity. I’ve tried Lightworks but it’s really slow on my laptop which is a shame as it seems easy to edit clips. Shotcut I can’t even watch the clips as it freezes. Cyber link powerdirector seems the best so far but hoping someone can guide me in another direction. Hoping it’s not the new laptop not powerful enough It was a mid range priced HP.

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What type of files are you editing? If 4K a mid range laptop may well be too slow, but it should be fine for 1080.

Best laptop under £1000 by far for video editing is an M1 MacBook Air, it eats 4K 10 bit 60fps no problem. Bargain for the money.

An new iPad will also Edit 4K easy with LumaFusion. Much better then most mid range Windows laptops sub £1000.

I have a work HP Elitebook 1 year old and that struggles with 4K.

Unless you are planning to spend quite a lot on an editor, for a PC, Powerdirector is pretty good, there’s also a free version of Davinci.

I use a new iPad Air and LumaFusion and also bought the 2020 M1 MacBook Pro which I use with Final Cut Pro which is the best solution but the iPad actually does a fine job also.

[gjdjud]

It was 4K 60fps from my camera. Maybe to much for my laptop to handle. Will try something more simple!

[YorkshireT]

Originally Posted by gjdjud

It was 4K 60fps from my camera. Maybe to much for my laptop to handle. Will try something more simple!

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Yes your laptop won’t handle it I’m afraid. You could test it with 24/30p (also it’s probably 8 bit anyway but if you have a high end camera with 10 bit go down to 8). It’ll probably be choppy on editing but you might be able to get it working to a useable extent. If not you’ll be limited to 1080.

[gjdjud]

Thank you. I didn’t think about what I shot the video in. I’m very new to this so going to start off simply. Going to lower the video quality to start off. I’ve found an editor called filmora that seems ok for me to get used to editing. I’ll go more advanced when I get more used to it!

[the_weird_one]

Is your laptop a Intel or AMD Processor?

If its an Intel one you could use Handbrake to transcode the video from your camera into a h.264 mkv which may help with Intels built in video accelerator for the compression and decompression h.264 codec

I am able to edit 60fps 4K on my work laptop (i5 with 16gb of ram) doing this but trying to do it with the files direct from the camera is basically unusable.

[gjdjud]

Originally Posted by the_weird_one

Is your laptop a Intel or AMD Processor?

If its an Intel one you could use Handbrake to transcode the video from your camera into a h.264 mkv which may help with Intels built in video accelerator for the compression and decompression h.264 codec

I am able to edit 60fps 4K on my work laptop (i5 with 16gb of ram) doing this but trying to do it with the files direct from the camera is basically unusable.

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It is intel. I do have handbrake so will have a look