If you do a lot of video or photo editing, the one thing you want to avoid when buying equipment is nasty surprises. A slow or badly equipped PC, laptop or tablet will be a drag on your creative process. Meanwhile, a subpar monitor or laptop display could yield videos that look shockingly different than what you saw during production. And you may miss a deadline if your machine can’t render the final product quickly enough.
This doesn’t just apply to PCs. Adobe is planning a full version of Photoshop for the iPad, and it’s developing an all-in-one video tool, Project Rush, that will work across platforms. Whichever app you choose, it’s crucial to do some hardware research to ensure that your equipment will work with the app rather than against it. Luckily, we’ve already done a good chunk of the homework for you. Here’s how to pick gear for photo and video creation, whether you’ve got $500 or $5,000.
The demands of photo and video editing
After installing a photo or video app, you may find it’s by far the most resource-hungry thing on your computer. So what do you need to rein in all that power?
Storage and memory. If you’re editing 4K videos or RAW 42-megapixel photos, storage space and RAM are paramount. A single RAW-image file can take up 100 MB, and 4K video files can be multi-gigabyte monsters. Without enough RAM to handle such files, your computer will slow to a crawl. And a lack of storage and a non-SSD program drive will make your PC drag to the point where you’ll constantly be deleting, copying and juggling files to get a project finished.
Sixteen gigabytes of RAM is really the bare minimum on laptops and desktop PCs for videos and photos, in my opinion, but 24GB or 32GB is ideal. I’d also recommend an SSD program drive, at a minimum, and preferably an NVMe M.2 drive with speeds of 1,500 MB/s or higher. If you edit videos on Mac or PC, your best bet for speed and flexibility is to use a fast USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt external hard disk or SSD.
Processors and multi-threading. Photo and video editing benefit more from multi-core processing more than just about any other type of app. Multi-threading can help you finish rendering and other activities more quickly and make switching between applications more seamless. Higher clock speeds boost everything as well, and overclocking, if done safely, can accelerate video- and photo-editing chores just like it does for gaming.
When choosing a CPU for a laptop or PC, it’s instructive to look at lists like this one from PassMark and compare the ranking (…….
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018-11-22-the-best-gear-for-photo-and-video-editing.html