how's MBA 13" top of the line for lightroom and video editing?

[jetlagged]

Hey folks,

I'm looking to buy a new notebook. I currently own a Dell notebook XPS M 1530 which i bought March 2008 (I believe the laptop itself was announce late in 2007) with the following specs:

Windows Vista
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.20 GHZ
3 GB of RAM
200 GB of hard drive space (well more like 173 gb)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

i do some basic lightroom editing of raw files from my DSLR, and video editing of my travel videos to upload to youtube. my biggest gripe with my current computer is how long it takes to render a 1080 video with sony vegas movie studio program, although its not so bad with corel video studio pro x5, also editing in ligthroom or even video editing for example, i notice a delayed response of a few seconds. I suck at video editing, my videos are so basic, though i would like to think i have gotten better.

see my youtube channel youtube.com/drjeepney just to get an idea of my amateurish video editing of my travel videos. started off with sony vegas movie studio, then switched to corel video studio pro x5.

I'm really looking forward to using iMovie and learning to edit my videos with that.

so yeah just wondering if anyone can answer my question.
it comes down to either a macbook air 13" top of the line which will cost me ($1699) or Macbook pro 13" ($1499)

pardon the long post, any helpful response is appreciated.

 

[Calot]

Hey folks,

I'm looking to buy a new notebook. I currently own a Dell notebook XPS M 1530 which i bought March 2008 (I believe the laptop itself was announce late in 2007) with the following specs:

Windows Vista
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.20 GHZ
3 GB of RAM
200 GB of hard drive space (well more like 173 gb)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

i do some basic lightroom editing of raw files from my DSLR, and video editing of my travel videos to upload to youtube. my biggest gripe with my current computer is how long it takes to render a 1080 video with sony vegas movie studio program, although its not so bad with corel video studio pro x5, also editing in ligthroom or even video editing for example, i notice a delayed response of a few seconds. I suck at video editing, my videos are so basic, though i would like to think i have gotten better.

see my youtube channel youtube.com/drjeepney just to get an idea of my amateurish video editing of my travel videos. started off with sony vegas movie studio, then switched to corel video studio pro x5.

I'm really looking forward to using iMovie and learning to edit my videos with that.

so yeah just wondering if anyone can answer my question.
it comes down to either a macbook air 13" top of the line which will cost me ($1699) or Macbook pro 13" ($1499)

pardon the long post, any helpful response is appreciated.

It really comes down to a few things:

the MBP is more powerful. But only processor-wise.
getting the most powerful 13" MBP and adding SSD makes it too expensive.
The MBP has less resolution than the MBA.

I'd say go for the MBA. Much snappier. It boots in around 10 seconds. The SSD is REALLY fast. You get a core i7 with 2.0 and 8GB of RAM. The graphics cards are the same, HD 4000, which is much more powerful than some ignorant people think.

 

[filmbuff]

Don't even bother with the i7. The standard i5 MBA will make your old laptop look like an abacus. Don't expect miracle rendering times though. Rendering will always take "too long" nomatter what computer you have.