Basic Laptop for basing editing and simple color grading

I'm in the market to upgrade my laptop computer - I don't need anything fancy as I'm still shooting 1080p and will eventually move to shooting 4K at some point but need something now that will work for basic editing and mild color grading on short projects while traveling or on location.

Since I'm dumping most of my tech budget into my desktop for the heavier lifting, all I really need is the ability to cut and do basic color grading in Resolve 14 (free) and then move the project over to my desktop for the more serious editing in Resolve.

I'm considering an older Dell M4700/M4800 with an i7 quad core, 16/32GB ram and probably a 2-4GB discrete GPU depending on the total cost. I want the 15" laptop for portability as I'm a solo shooter and editor and try to keep things as compact and simple as possible.

I know these models aren't the latest and greatest, just need something more than my Dell M4500 which won't even run Resolve 12.5 because of memory full error messages due to my ancient 1GB Quadro FX880M GPU which can't be upgraded.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

I would highly recommend at least a 4GB GPU for 4k editing, especially for color correction, if you're going to be using Resolve and you get any less vram you will likely not be able to encode your footage without running out of video memory

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

Hi.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O and compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. So I will recommend a least a GPU with 4GB vRam for HD.

Look for a Laptop with one of the new Intel 6 core 12 threads mobile CPU such as the 8750H. They only cost a few dollars more than the 4 core versions, but give up to 40% more
performance.


4K/UHD have 4 times the pixels of Full HD and require much stronger CPU and a
GPU with much more CUDA/OpenCl performance and Video ram.

Please read the DaVinci Resolve 15 Configuration Guide. Its is valid for version 14 to.
Here are some recommandation for Laptops:

http://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/D ... _Guide.pdf

Regards Carsten.