We made three premium laptops duke it out to see which is best for video editing

By David Cogen February 23, 2017

Video editors looking to take their craft out of the house have a glut of choices when it comes to stylish, slim laptops. Apple’s MacBook Pro is a perennial favorite, but recent changes to its connectivity and battery life has hurt its reputation among the power users who relied on the system. Razer’s Blade has been revised a few times, and packs in the latest gaming hardware — a good look for video editing. Finally, Microsoft’s Surface Book with Performance Base has splashed onto the scene, offering up competitive performance and a versatile form factor.

But the question remains, which is the best for video editing and encoding? To find out, David from The Unlockr faced them off in a test that replicated his real-world working conditions. He took 4K footage, did some light color correction, and then times the process to encode to both 4K and 1080p for YouTube.

Of course, video encoding is an incredibly demanding process that stresses basically every component in your system. The processor and RAM are working overtime, and even your drives are going to be sweating trying to keep up. In order to help leverage the extra computing power in the GPU, Nvidia users can use CUDA acceleration to help speed up the process. As a result, the more powerful GTX 1060 and high-wattage, quad-core, eight-thread CPU in the Blade pushes it to a strong lead over both the Surface Book with Performance Base and MacBook Pro 15 with Touch Bar.

Of course, encoding performance isn’t the only factor when it comes to video editing, as the video mentions. The Macbook’s amazing display and Touch Bar may be a good fit for people already used to the MacOS ecosystem. Likewise, the Surface Book’s 3:2 aspect ratio is a great layout for video editing, and the sensitive touch screen could allow for easy touch-up work.

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