How does Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas run on a $480 laptop?
For the past few months my wife as been complaining how slow her computer has become. Her computer is a laptop that we have doc’ed to a keyboard and monitor and when we are on vacation we take it with us.
On vacations she has always complained about the keyboard not working well so I headed to Costco before our last vacation to pickup a new laptop for her. The main requirement was for it was to have a good keyboard since I knew anything new would be fast enough for her web usage.
She ended up picking the Acer Aspire 5560-Sb653 which was pretty much the cheapest laptop there at $480. I was kind of hoping that she would have picked a higher-end model with an I7 processor, more RAM and an NVidia card so I could create videos of our vacations from the laptop.
So I was really surprised when I put Premiere Pro CS5.5 on it and I was able to make a few videos with it on the road.
You can’t scrub through the video with the laptop and occasionally after 45 minutes of editing it would crash, but I actually made 4 videos with it so far. Before it would crash I could sense it slowing down and I would reboot.
It is running:
- Windows 7 64bit
- AMD Quad-Core A6-3400M
- AMD Radeon HD 6520G
- 6 GB DDR3 Memory
- 500 GB HDD
- 15.6″ HD LED LCD screen
Tilt of the screen, this part sucks, if you move your head 5 degrees off axis the contrast can change so much you really need to pay attention how you are looking at the screen.
I tried Sony Vegas Pro 11 which just came out a couple days ago and I did a quick project on it and it seems to work fine, but I don’t not have hours of testing like with Premiere. I get lots of questions why Vegas doesn’t work on their 4 year desktop and I hate to tell them the answer but sometimes you need to get a new computer. I was suprised to see that Sony Vegas Pro 11 actually scrubs better than Premiere Pro CS5.5.
As I described this laptop does have some issues, but I can crank out a simple project I feel this is probably the minimum you can use. I get a new desktop every two years because editing heavily compressed video is very demanding on the computer. If you are on a very tight budget and you only have $480 for a computer, this might work for you until you can afford something better.
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Canon 50mm 1.8
One solution would be to do an offline edit. Convert all your footage to a lower resolution format, edit with that and then re-link it later just before the final render.
For a serious Premiere rig, you don’t want to use an AMD processor or AMD/ ATI video chipsets. With the processor, AMD’s don’t have newer SSE instructions. For the video card, Premiere offers additional acceleration and rendering for the higher end Nvidia GTX chipsets. My middle of the road specs would be:
Core i7 2600
12 – 16 GB of RAM
Nvidia Geforce GTX 285
Usually the main reasons a computer will slow down are heat and memory issues.
Heat is probably your big issue. If you get one of those cooling pads with the fans in it,that should greatly help. A processor runs much better the cooler it is once it start heating up, the resistance in the tiny little circuitry of the CPU starts the ramp up thus increasing the heat even more…
The other issue is memory, I bet you could probably find some upgrade RAM for that laptop (just be sure to match the specs exactly) What is happening is once your RAM is full it starts trying to sort through and filter the least important data and saves it to your hard drive in a paging file. This takes CPU cycles and bandwidth. And slows things down. It also over a long period of time will increasingly fragment your hard drive even further slowing things down.
So when you restart the biggest thing is you are resetting the paging files. so you see some speed for a short while but eventually you will right back chugging along.
check on newegg for some RAM and a cooling pad, I bet you will see it at least last longer than 45 minutes.
That was a really helpful film. Thanks Dave. I have been sucked into Apple’s all consuming Empire by using my wife’s Macbook Pro with FCPx… I find that a tad slow too, but it works
Some effects in CS5.5 do not use Mercury Playback Engine, and take forever to render even on a i7.
As a person that first true NLE was Vegas 4.0, Vegas has evolved into a very good program. Vegas is a very intuitive program. Vegas doesn’t get enough respect, mainly because it’s thin on plugins. AE, Premiere, Avid, and Final Cut get the bulk of the third party plugins. I’ve moved onto Premiere Pro for some of these reasons, but use Vegas for quick projects.
@Barry that is very true, Vegas does not get the respect it deserves.
I have a year old dell desktop with an AMD quad core procesor, I think its the 820, 4 gigs of ram, and 500gb of stock crappy HDD.
Should I upgrade to 12 gigs of ram? Or maybe get an intel processor or something? It works pretty much fine, but every so often, premiere or after effects just shut down.
Also, in AE, I can’t scrub through the timeline, only in premiere. It takes almost a second for the 1080p frames to load.
What should I upgrade?
I’ve recently brought a laptop in the UK (from Zoostorm) for just £400. 8GB 1333Mhz DDR3, i3 2.55Ghz processor and a good keyboard (So many laptops have bad keyboards these days)
The laptop can be used to cut together video quite well, and for making time lapses on the go, which is good enough until I get to my desktop. Any more than 2 DSLR feeds at once starts to lag CS5.5 down a bit (A pause between hitting Play and it actually playing), and colour correction instantly lags the laptop, but for journeys or on the field, it works good enough for getting a rough cut going.
I am on a year and a half old HP that I bought for $800.. I have the1.8Ghz i7, 4Gb RAM, and a 1Gb dedicated ghaphics card(Awsome for running MPE in Premiere, Make everything so much nicer). I am running CS5 and never have any issues editing or rendering my 60D footage right out of camera.. I am looking to upgrade to 8Gb RAM and put a SSD in place of my DVD drive..
Actually, I recommend building your own computer. Very easy to do.
My machine which I built with a friend has much the same issues as crashing randomly in Sony Vegas – I’ll recheck what everyone suggested here, but it seems unlikely as the beast has 8 duel-core fans.
Michelle
Hi David, your videos are awesome. Learning a lot.
I was just wondering, How are your videos so clear? Anything I shoot on my 550D is nowhere near as clear as your ones. Is it just to do with exposure/White balance, or is it lenes?
Getting the 50mm 1.8 this weekend. Boo-yea.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
You’re the man.
Love from Ireland!
^^^ and computer power.
No one use Notebook for video editing even professional only use them to show the work to others or express their way of doing in real time every one need a workstation. There is no point putting a high end software in a notebook. it is really waste of the software cost i would say. If you cannot afford a workstation at least DIY Desktop. with below
Core i5 at-least i7 better
8GB minimum (Ram Depend on your Projects)
7200 RPM Hdd (SSD or 10000rpm better)
Get a good PSU (They will prolong the lifetime and save energy)
GTX 560 or higher if you want Mercury Playback Engine
Full HD monitor i recommend IPS if you are in any Graphic editing as well.
Hi Dave,
1.The biggest performance boost would be to increase your RAM and then also bump up your virtual memory size.
2.Also kill any other programs running in the background that are not necessary. Many times there are a ton of start programs your not even using that can be turned off.
3.You can also kill a lot of the windows services that your are just not going to use.
4.Lastly, keeping the laptop cool is important. Once you try that you should see a big improvement on performance.
Regards,
Erik Salmon