Macbook pro wanted

[keith with the teef]

My daughter says she needs a macbook pro.

Obvs I only know desk top and with the likes of the new amd chips out, the idea of spending oodles of cash on a mac book pro seems daft.

Ideas: What will be the best boxing clever purchase for a mac book pro be, reconditioned or nearly new etc, 13 or 15 inch screen?

She wants to get into video editing and her mac book air practically falls over editing photos. Like proper phots.

Ta. keith

[Dave Rice]

Don’t forget storage and backup.

[keith with the teef]

She already has a wd 2TB external spinner.

I guees she will need internal 500GB sdd internal. 🙂

[keith with the teef]

OK, we figure we got this now. No sweat.

Just need to get a portable generator for the AMD GPU when working in the field. Battery rinse. 🙂

[Dave Rice]

I thought you were going to say you need a second mortgage ?

[Ed P]

As you say – oodles of cash for no performance, but trying to wean someone onto a Win10 machine with its better bang for buck maybe a hard sell. However if you can get her to accept that route I would be tempted to tell her to use CorelDraw (Home & Student Edition). It gives >95% of the editing power of Adobe Photoshop at student prices.

With respect to hardware purchases – Apple has its own (pricey) second hand market, but I think I’d give that a miss and use one of the refurb laptop specialists or even Cex (2 year warranty). Screen size is a personal preference thing but most photo editors like big screens (more cash!)

Video editing is also handled fairly directly on PCs and there are numerous options that are cheaper than Apple’s. With a PC it is also easy to install a Linux VM and use free software such as Kdenlive. Even Gimp can (sort-of) be used as a free photo editor. I personally find it underpowered but others make do with it and it is after all FREE! Dan can probably better advise on the use of Blender in Linux (or Windows) for photo and video compositing. Imo that is the future in that it has more facilities and opportunities than even Photoshop.

[keith with the teef]

OK she got a 15 inch i7 2.6Ghz 4770 AMD 450 2GB. A condition and it is.

Spec wize it only has 250GB ssd internal but was over £100 chesper than a same spec grade B machine with a 500GB ssd and so the money she saved we got a 1TB sandisc with all type adapters external drive for £150ish.

Its actually no that bad at photo and video edeting and moves at not to bad a pace so long as you are conneted to the mains. Just above slow I would say.

Its surprisingly heavy, daughter happy. As things go, I would say for that sort of thing a boxing clever purchase. But ouch.

[Ed P]

If she wants to future-proof herself tell her to learn to model, composite and render in Blender (free). You have seen some of the stuff produced by Dan, but I’d draw your daughter’s attention to Blender movies! link

Dan probably has better examples as unfortunately I still have not learned to move from my relatively expensive (and obsolete) software.

[keith with the teef]

Thanks. She knows composite. She put some toy soldiers running around in the jungle. But does not realy use it per say.

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