Film production student laptop?

Hey! I’ve applied for film production at a few universities to start in 2021, and I was accepted to AUB which is where I want to go. I want to get a laptop to take with me to university because I want to work on my own projects outside of uni, where I won’t necessarily have access to the editing suites. Before this, I’ve mainly edited on my phone or got my friends with better laptops to edit for me, as the laptop I have isn’t good enough to run any editing software.

I was wondering if anyone had any cheap laptops I could consider buying to take with me? I was going to get the student Adobe package too as that’s quite cheap for what it offers, so something that can run that is preferable. I don’t have a lot of money, so if it’s really budget friendly, I’d be more than grateful.

I’ve looked on websites and YouTube and things like that, but none of it seemed to be very useful at all.

Thank you for your help

What's your budget?

Getting the student Adobe package is a great idea! I’m currently at the Screen and Film School in Brighton and I edit on a Macbook for both my studies and freelance stuff.
I’m used to Apple products and like how Adobe runs on macs so I’d consider looking into a MacBook? You can buy a refurbished one for around £700-£1000 and in mine and my friends experiences, they run as if they’re brand new. What I would say though, if getting a MacBook, get the pro and not the air. It’s worth spending a couple extra hundreds pounds for the pro as it’ll last longer and run smoother. I would definitely also buy an external harddrive too with at least 1TB ... it’ll be your lifesaver! Hope this helped!

I’m not too sure tbh, most I found online were under £1000. I’m thinking like maximum £700 but most likely less.

Sorry I didn't come back sooner.

For £700, there isn't going to be a MacBook with a good level of spec to handle your degree, and I'd also be questioning how long they'd be supported for with the transition to Apple Silicon meaning that the older Intel based Macs are likely to lose their support within a couple of years.

With that said, the best laptop around your budget is going to be this ASUS for £750. It's still stretching your budget by around £50, but due to the MX250 graphics chip inside, it's worth it as the MX250 will do a better job of video editing than what you'd find in any laptop sub-£700.

Thank you so much for looking into this for me! I was just wondering if you could compare that to another laptop I found... This one is £100 over budget (Acer Swift 3 Ryzen 7) - https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/acer-swift-3-14-laptop-amd-ryzen-7-1-tb-ssd-silver-10208162-pdt.html

A lot of reviews said this would be good for editing. Do you reckon it’s worth the £50 more than your recommendation? Or do you think your recommendation would be better?

Once again, thank you for all your help!

I don't know what software you'll be using, but if you're going to be using Adobe Premiere (or straight up don't know), I'd skip that one because as of the last time I checked, Premiere didn't support the Ryzen CPUs, meaning that exports would be really slow, and there's no dGPU to fall back on.

If stretching your budget isn't the problem, I'd take a look at this one. It's a similar laptop to the one I linked originally, but it swaps out the Core i5 and MX250 for an AMD Ryzen 5 and an MX350(the software you're using will use this rather than the CPU's integrated graphics, so everything I said above doesn't apply to this one).

With this new one you suggested, do you think the 256SSD is too small? Also yeah. I’m looking to get Adobe software to edit.

Yes and no. It is a bit cramped, but if you find it too small you can always get an external drive.

I have an old external hard drive I used for my Xbox, but I don’t use it anymore. Would that work?

Depends on whether it uses a USB connection.

It's a Seagate one, it has a USB connection, as well as a power cable that has to plug into the wall.

It should work fine then.

Perfect, thank you for literally ALL of your help!! I think I might go £200 over budget and get the ASUS ZenBook 14 but with Ryzen 7 and 512GB SSD. Do you think that’s a good idea?

Yeah, I don't see why not, your use case will definitely be able to take advantage of the extra power, so it's not like you're just chucking money down the drain.

you’ve been a life saver! thank you for your help. have a good week