basically, i go to a school that is for video editing and we use imacs in the classroom to do the editing. i need a laptop to take to school but something that is enough to do light video editing on. im planing on buying the base retina and getting an external hard drive sometime down the road, but i want to know if the upgraded regular 15'' would be a better option.
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for video editing, is the base retina enough?
- Thread starter darkelement
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In terms of performance, GPU and CPU would be the same. However, if you ran the RMBP at full or higher resolution, it would cut down on GPU speed as the GPU would need to give data to more pixels.
If you get the older model and are comfortable working inside, you could upgrade to 16GB RAM yourself, put a 128-256 GB SSD in it yourself, and then put a 1TB mechanical drive in the optical bay. Then you would not need to buy a portable external.
But consider that video editing can be very resource intensive. My older MBP gets to over 200° F when working in Premiere. I am very excited for the new cooling design in the RMBP.
You're basically going to end up paying the same price. Why not get the retina? 8GB ram and 256GB SDD will be more than enough to handle what you are doing. And you get a better display!
And a much better cooling system that could make the computer last longer and not overheat.
To give you some context, the new RMBP is beating some of the benchmark scores from 6 and 8 core Mac Pros. They are more than enough to do editing work on. Even my dual-core MBP from 2010 is great at editing in Final Cut/Premiere and animating in After Effects.