Laptop for Photo and Video Editing
As for Apple;
A little extra quality costs a lot more $.
I use my laptop in the field, in the hotel room and in my office. It needed to be strong enough to take knocks in my backpack while snowboarding and in the back of my car with all my gear or on the passenger seat rendering while in transit; so having an aluminum unibody, SSD with strong internals, long battery life and a solid warranty was worth the price tag. Not that the price tag was a factor since I hire/lease it for tax purposes. (Personally I find using the argument of price inconsequential for professional tools since hire/lease is available - If your buying outright, fair call, cheap products are cheap to replace regularly whether they break or become outdated).
Over the decades I have invested to much in apple software to switch now, but often use Windows as an employee and sometimes run windows on my mac.
It really is “either or”. If you are on Windows and have software you can stick with it because at any stage you can go Mac without any loss (most new computers can run either operating systems anyway), it’s more about hardware.
I have run a mac book pro for my last two editing machines and both have/are performing flawlessy for what I need.
Many of the important points have already been made in this thread, I’ll make a few more here,
Adobe CS(5/6) and graphics compatibility - Key to ensure if you run this editing suite (I do, love it) look into mercury engine playback - It’s an engine that allows multi layer processing of video’s on the timeline at much greater efficiency, most Nvidia cards are supported, some others not, but it allowed me to use my 2008 MBP with my 7D fairly seamlessly.
RAM - Don’t sell yourself short here. This is probably the most important aspect for future lifespan of your new machine. I recently forked out extra dollars to run 16gb ram on my new mbp and it is worth every penny. If your building a PC, by all means go for 32gb. Preview and Render files take up huge amounts of RAM, especially once you start to play with some effects in After Effects/3D studio max/Cinema 4D. You might not think you have much use for these now, however once you dabble in one of them, you’ll see how much better they can be for creating intro’s, real 3D titles, and most importantly, colour correction. The second reason you want RAM is having the ability to run your editing software aswell as music/browsing/photoshop or any combination of programs that eat processing power. Buy lots of RAM!
Inevitably this will be a mac vs pc hate/fanboy saga for many, however I personally believe mac to be a better suited OS, with hardware that’s guarantee’d to ‘talk’ to each other seamlessly, and something that won’t let you down. I also run windows for a number of program on my mac, and that also has not crashed on me.
I have found in the past that custom built PC’s that are specced up and look incredible on paper often have internal clashes between graphics and processors that just don’t like each other much, and the machine won’t run how you built it to.
Basically, this is something thats either going to keep you editing, or get you frustrated by a machine that doesn’t run as quickly as you want. If I’m buying any sort of toy like a camera or computer, spend the money and get what you pay for.
FCP is the industry standard for editing, however I find the seamless integration between premiere, after effects, speed grade, photoshop, bridge to make a way better workflow, and 7D footage is good for native editing in Premiere.
haha like indeed.
Hey Cam do you use twixtor by any chance and if so did you get it as a plugin for after effects or for FC asuming you use FC?
rick, I use twixtor sometimes, (I use premiere not FC), however use twixtor within AE. the CS6 plugin I got didn’t work in prem for whatever reason, the cs5 one did. The twixtor and AE setup is a little better anyway.. You just have to render out the file as ‘lossless’ as possible, while not actually using the lossless setting. “Lossless” = huge file size. Set the render up to mimick the codec native to your DLSR raw footage.
I “acquired” cs5 master suite/collection. so good but my pool lil laptop couldnt handle it…
yeah im looking into getting Twixtor but im not sure if i should get it as a plug-in for AE or FC, everyone seems to lean towards AE tho so i think ill go with it haha
Thanks
i have a toshiba satellite A500, 4gb ram, 1gb dedicated graphics + 1.7gb shared, 500gb hdd and built in digital tv tuner. it runs Adobe CS5 master suit fine (sometimes abit slow if i have a few things open), used to play cod4 & 5 and other games on it without fault.
for the money it was compared to an apple mac at the time i just couldnt justify the mac. in saying that i recently got a samsung galaxy 10.1 tab, i kind of regret going that way instead of an iPad for a few reasons, but it does have its redeeming points.
my 2 cents 
Hi Jaydeep Biswas Here. I got Dell Inspiron R series you should try this it has extremely amazing features.
What features do you mean Jaydeep?
And welcome onboard!