Minimum Computer Requirements to Edit DSLR Video with NLE

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• published: 24 Oct 2011
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http://www.learningdslrvideo.com/minimum-requirements-nle/ 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.