16Jul Asus Zenbook Prime UX32VD ultrabook for editing?
I was pretty interested in the original Zenbook release at the beginning of the year, but many of you told me it would probably be a good idea to hold off on buying one until the next generation Zenbook was released. It appears the new Zenbook Prime has made some large steps forward from the original.
There is nothing wrong with my current editing laptop, other then it’s size, so I’ll probably be waiting until the beginning of next year to replace it. But if you’re in the market and willing to do a little bit of dissection, the Zenbook Prime UX32VD could be a very nice machine to have. Right now the Zenbook Prime is available for pre-order on B&H for $1299 with free shipping, their also offering a 6 months same as cash option that could sweeten the deal.
July 16th, 2012 at 9:11 am
Looks like a value for the size and power. Would you recommend editing video on an SSD drive? I don’t have any experience with it, although I just installed an SSD drive and was warned to keep all the video data on a spinning drive, lest overworking the SSD and shortening it’s life. What kind of projects are you editing on your current editing laptop?
July 16th, 2012 at 10:08 am
On my current laptop I use an external SSD for editing and an external 1tb drive for backup. Using an SSD to edit is probably one of the best applications I can think of for an SSD. Lager continues files written to the drive once, then read from the drive multiple times while editing the project. Just remember that there isn’t much in the way of recover if an SSD crashes. I’ve lost an 80 gb Intel drive and a 128 gb OCZ drive over the last few years. Thankfully I copy the project folder over to a second drive and copy the project file every time I sit down to edit. So the worst case is usually less then a day worth of editing lost.
It could be that video editing on these SSD drives has caused early failure, but from what I understand writing to the drive is what causes shortened life spans not reading from the drive. Editing usually requires two major writes to a drive, footage transfer, and the pre-render files. After that most of the drive use is read operations. Someone correct me if I’m wrong on this but read operations on an SSD are none destructive.
My current laptop gets a lot of use with motion graphics, basic editing, audio mixing, and rendering (depending on the project). But it’s biggest job is asset management. At the end of a day of shooting I sit down for a few hours and copy footage and review clips. It’s also nice to have when I need to make minor changes to an edit on location. If I have major AE work to do I generally use my desktop, 24gb of ram and a 2gb graphics card seems to really help rendering times.
July 16th, 2012 at 10:34 am
Well somehow this laptop is available already in my country although costs 1600€. I mean wtf?
I can give 100€ more to buy the MacbookPro 13,3 i7 quad core 2.9ghz 750gb and 8gb RAM. they just differ in screen resulotion.
Damn i really want this Macbook model.
July 16th, 2012 at 11:03 am
The VAT tax really seems to be painful. Almost everything seems higher priced in the euro zone.
July 16th, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Actually mostly Greece.
July 16th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Just looking over the 15 inch Macbook pro and your right, only real difference is the the display, I didn’t release the Zenbook actually gave the Macbook pro a run for its money, but the price here for the pro with those specs is $2100. The Zenbook prime on the other is $1300, add 8gb of ram for $54 and a 750 GB Hybrid Drive
for $140 and the Zenbook will still save you around $600 in the states and you’ll have a nicer display, 2 gb more ram, and a slightly faster hybrid drive.
There has to be another reason why the Zenbook costs 1600€ ($1962 USD). That’s almost a $700 price jump, it can’t be all taxes can it? For that much I’d probably consider the Macbook pro as well.
July 16th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
I was talking about the 13.3″ Macbook.
In US it costs 1699$ that’s only 200$ more from Zenbook.
The new 15″ retina Macbook (which has a unique display 2880 by 1800 pixels) costs 2,200$. That’s why it costs so much.
But i was actually talking about the 13.3″
July 16th, 2012 at 8:03 pm
That makes a little more sense. The 15″ I was looking at was the version without the retina display.