• 3 hours ago
Transcript
00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here. So this is a video on what I believe to be the best
00:09laptops for content creation. So your mileage is going to vary, everyone's idea of content
00:14creation is a little bit different, but mine is video editing. So this is obviously a video
00:18that's kind of geared towards video editing. The other thing is that these laptops are
00:22all 14 or 15 inch screens, and I chose them because I prefer working off of larger screens
00:27just to kind of see what I'm doing, but it's also because you get the quad core processors
00:32with these larger devices. And quad core processors are important for me, so yeah, that's what
00:37we're getting. 14 inch or 15 inch laptops with quad core processors. Let us begin. Actually,
00:43before we go in, I've done individual reviews for each one of these, so if you're interested,
00:47I will link the individual reviews below. And yeah, first up, XPS 15. This is the device
00:54that I used for most of 2016. I want to say like 80% of my videos from last year were
00:59done on the XPS 15, the older version. This is the newer one. My favorite features, the
01:044K screen, extremely color accurate, and the thin bezels are nice. I also like that you
01:09can stick 32 gigs of RAM in here, and the battery life is also good. It's an easy seven
01:13or eight hours on this thing. The things I don't like, the speakers are not very good.
01:18They're in a bad position, and they're small. It also only has three USB ports, one of them
01:23being Thunderbolt 3. I would occasionally run out of ports when I had a lot of drives
01:26and stuff connected to it, but overall, really good performance, really good device. Next
01:31is the Razer Blade. This is the Kaby Lake model running a GTX 1060. It's really similar
01:36to the Skylake, it's just a little bit more efficient. So obviously, one of the big advantages
01:41of the Razer Blade is the GTX 1060 in a relatively thin and light chassis, and that makes it
01:46pretty unique. But one of the things that I recently started doing was customizing keyboard
01:50shortcuts. So in Premiere, I bind things for video editing, like zooming in and out. Instead
01:55of the plus and minus keys, or even using the mouse scroll, I'll bind it to three and
01:59four, so I can just do it with one hand. And this isn't just for Premiere, you can do this
02:03with most applications. But recently, I tried changing the colors of my keys to the shortcuts,
02:09and because it has individual RGB for each key, I really like it. And when you're done,
02:13you can switch the profile back to normal. I don't like that the RAM on this is soldered
02:17on. I'd love to get 32 gigs on this, but I'm stuck at 16. And fan noise can get loud.
02:22The Kaby Lake model runs a little bit quieter than the Skylake model, like the fans don't
02:26come on as readily, it's just a more efficient chip. But it's a GTX 1060 in there, when you're
02:31doing heavy stuff, fans kick in, it's gonna be loud. Okay, the third thing in this mix
02:35is the 2016 MacBook Pro. I have like a love-hate relationship with this thing. It looks awesome,
02:41and pricing has improved quite a bit, because it's now in the Apple refurbished store. Things
02:45I like about it. I like the build quality, I think it's phenomenal. Speakers are amazing,
02:49I can edit videos right off of these speakers. Screen is really good. Keyboard is, well, everyone's
02:54a little bit different. Some people hate it, some people love it. My personal experience,
02:58I like it, I legitimately like it. But everyone's gonna be different, some people are just gonna
03:01hate this thing forever. That's okay. The touch bar is whatever. At this point, I think
03:06it's a gimmick, I never use it. I also don't love the port situation, and the graphics
03:11chip in here, the Radeon Pro 460, for the right application, it's good, like if you're
03:15Final Cut user, it's perfect. But if you're an Adobe user, and I'm an Adobe user, it doesn't
03:20really perform that well. And for most people who are on a tighter budget, but really want
03:24to get a Mac for content creation, I would steer them towards the 2015 model. You can
03:28get some really good pricing on this, and they're just almost identical in performance
03:32to the new model. In case you're wondering, all these laptops have skins on them, they're
03:36like a marble skin. If you're interested in picking one up, there's a link in the video
03:40description. Now, none of these are cheap, and I need to stress the fact that you totally
03:43don't need equipment like this to make really good content. Like, these are expensive, but
03:47the way I see it is this, if you can get equipment that speeds up your workflow, it just makes
03:52the whole content creation process that much better. One of the reasons why these are so
03:55expensive, aside from being thin and light machines, is because the screens are really
03:59good quality. They're color accurate and bright, and the Razer Blade has an updated 4K panel
04:04that's coming out soon. Okay, I want to briefly talk about performance. Last year, most of
04:08my content was shot on a 4K camera called the Panasonic GH4. This year, most of my stuff
04:13is shot on a 5K camera called the Scarlett W. Now, in general, it's just bigger files,
04:18higher resolution files, so editing that stuff takes a little more horsepower. The GTX 1060
04:24on the Razer Blade doesn't make a huge difference for 4K content over the 1050, but when you
04:29go to higher resolution files, the difference is more noticeable. The biggest difference,
04:34comes from switching from NVIDIA graphics to the AMD graphics, which you find on MacBooks.
04:40Adobe Premiere performs much better on NVIDIA chips because of the CUDA cores. AMD chips,
04:45like the ones in current MacBooks, use OpenCL or Metal to render. The short of it is this,
04:50if you use Adobe Premiere, you're going to get way better performance with NVIDIA chips,
04:54but if you use Final Cut, those AMD chips are great. Now, I use Adobe Premiere, but the only
04:58reason why I use it is because that's just what I learned on. Any of the editing programs are
05:02great. If you look at the render times, like some people will really fixate on this and think that
05:07Final Cut is the better program because it renders faster. It does, but really, when you make a video,
05:12some of these are like 20-hour jobs. Who cares if you wait an extra five or ten minutes? It's
05:16really not a big deal. Any one of the editing programs are great, including the ones that I've
05:20never even heard of or used. If they exist on the market, you can make YouTube videos
05:24really well with them. Okay, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it,
05:28subs if you loved it. I'll see you guys next time.