Best laptops for video editing in 2024

The best laptops for video editing are powerful enough to tackle big edit jobs but also light enough to carry all day, with a screen vibrant and accurate enough to allow you to do your best work. Long-lasting battery life is also important if you don't want to lug a charger around alongside the laptop.

The good news is that you now have more options than ever before, thanks to recent advances in CPU development. AMD, Intel and even Apple have met consumer demand for smaller, more powerful laptops with some beefy laptop CPUs.

If you're chiefly interested in doing recreational video editing and plan to stick to 1080p resolution, there are lots of thin and light laptops powerful enough to get the job done. Just make sure you're using the best video editing software for your needs.

However, if you plan to work in 4K and/or editing video files with high bitrates, you'll want a beefy laptop with a performant CPU, speedy hard drive, lots of RAM, and a discrete graphics card. The best gaming laptops often satisfy these requirements, though they tend to eat up battery when working at full capacity.

Read on for our curated list of the best laptops for video editing, which should help make your buying decision a little easier.

Written by

Written by

Alex Wawro

Alex Wawro is a lifelong journalist who's spent over a decade covering tech, games and entertainment. He oversees the computing department at Tom's Guide, which includes managing laptop coverage and reviewing many himself every year. 

The quick list

In a hurry? Here's a brief overview of the laptops on this list, along with quick links that let you jump down the page directly to a review of whichever laptop catches your eye.

The best laptops for video editing you can buy today

The best laptop for video editing overall

Want a great laptop for editing video on the go? Then you may be looking for the beastly 16-inch MacBook Pro, which sports either M3 Pro or M3 Max chips that deliver shocking amounts of performance. 

This model features the same gorgeous mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR display as its predecessors and once you get over the notch, you'll be wowed by its contrast and smoothness, especially with its 120Hz refresh rate.

On top of that, you get the return of the ports that pros demand. That's not just the safety-focused MagSafe 3 charging port, but HDMI-out for connecting to displays and an SD memory reader for connecting memory cards for real-deal cameras. Oh, and don't think MagSafe will take USB-C charging out of the picture: the MacBook Pro's trio of Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports also draw power. Plus you get a 1080p webcam, a trio of improved microphones and a stellar six-point speaker system.

Read our full MacBook Pro (16-inch) 2023 review.

The best laptop for video editing on the go

The MacBook Pro 14-inch 2023 is one of the most powerful portable laptops money can buy, and that’s because of the new M3Pro chip from Apple, which delivers even faster performance than the previous generation. If you need to cut video on the go and don't want to pay extra for the larger 16-inch model, the 14-inch Pro is a great choice.

This laptop turned in class-leading results on multiple tests, including Geekbench, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and video transcoding. Based on our testing, you can blaze through creative work and even play demanding games like Resident Evil Village with pristine graphics and smooth frame rates.

It all looks good too thanks to the 14-inch mini-LED display, and you'll appreciate awesome 6-speaker sound system and comfy keyboard and touchpad. Plus, the 1080p camera is a bit better thanks to a new ISP. The HDMI port now supports up to 8K displays, and you still get an SD card slot.

Read our full MacBook Pro (14-inch) review.

The best Windows laptop for video editing

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) is a great gaming laptop that's also pretty portable, delivering a potent blend of performance, portability and power efficiency. 

We've long been fans of the Zephyrus G14 because it has the chops to run most games at solid framerates, the efficiency to be used as a work laptop, and a slim, compact chassis that's more portable than most gaming laptops. While it's not tailor-made for video editing the way the MacBook Pros are, the fact that it can be configured with a speedy CPU, a good (for a laptop) discrete GPU and plenty of RAM makes it a decent video editing platform in a pinch.

The 2022 model we reviewed has a better, brighter screen than its predecessor, with good speakers and an AMD CPU/GPU combo that delivers solid gaming performance. It also sports a built-in webcam, something earlier models lacked.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephryus G14 (2022) review.

Considering an older model? They're still great; read our full Asus ROG Zephryus G14 review from 2020 to see why.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro 2022 (from $1,299) was the first M2-powered Apple laptop to hit the market. While the design is a bit dated, it's a solid choice for video editing on the go thanks to the power of M2.

And based on our tests, the M2 chip delivers, offering performance that destroys competing Windows laptops. The M2 also beats the M1 chip by a significant margin in various benchmarks. Plus, the new MacBook Pro 2022 delivers among the longest battery life we've seen from a modern laptop, surpassing 18 hours of runtime.

However, while this notebook sports a new slice of Apple silicon, the design shows its age. You get the same form factor, same ports, same display and same webcam. Meanwhile, the new MacBook Air 2022 offers a larger display with thinner bezels, a 1080p webcam and a thinner, lighter design.

Read our full MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2022) review.

The MacBook Air is one of the lightest laptops you can buy, and once Apple started putting its own silicon in these slim ultraportables they became some of the fastest and longest-lasting laptops on the market.

The 13-inch MacBook Air M3 is the strongest example yet, delivering remarkably speedy performance and battery-sipping power efficiency in a svelte, attractive design. It doesn't have the graphical muscle, video editing optimizations or expansive port array of the MacBook Pro, but if you just want something to edit home movies with, the latest Air is more than good enough iMovie.

So if you don't need to do a lot of heavy-duty video editing and don't mind the more limited ports available on the Air, it's a capable little low-power video editing platform that's easy to carry on your next family trip.

Read our full MacBook Air 13-inch M3 review.

Don’t let its slim and stylish design fool you — the Dell XPS 15 is an absolute workhorse, and if you trick it out it can be a decent machine for video editing on the go. 

Its cutting-edge Intel CPUs deliver plenty of processing power for daily tasks, and if you pay to upgrade it with a beefy GeForce RTX GPU and some extra RAM/storage it should have more than enough oomph to get you through your next video project. Factor in a pair of impressively loud speakers and solid battery life, as well as an absolutely gorgeous OLED screen option, and you start to see why the XPS 15 is such an appealing laptop.

Read our full Dell XPS 15 OLED review.

Battery benchmarks: comparison

If you plan to edit video on the go, you want to have a good sense of how long your laptop can last before having to plug in and charge. 

That's why we run every laptop we review through a series of battery tests to see how long it actually lasts on a full charge, which is one of the key deciding factors for most people when buying a laptop. 

Note that these tests do not reflect real-world use patterns since we have to set every laptop to the same settings in order to do fair comparisons. Thus, while the times listed here are accurate and useful as a comparison point, your own experience with a laptop's battery life will likely vary quite a bit.

This is because when we run our battery test we set the laptop's display to 150 nits of brightness and have it endlessly browse the web via Wi-Fi until it dies. However, when you use your laptop you're likely adjusting brightness on the fly, doing all sorts of different tasks while perhaps listening to music or watching a video at the same time, and generally putting the machine through more of a workout than it gets in our test.

So while I stand by our testing and the battery life results we compare in the chart below, I want to be clear that your own experience will vary! 

How we tested these laptops

How we test the best laptops

In our never-ending quest to find the best laptops we put every computer we test through a barrage of synthetic and real-world tests to benchmark how well it performs compared to the manufacturer's claims, and compare how good it is relative to the competition.

These tests include, but are not limited to: measuring the average brightness and color quality of each laptop's display using our in-house colorimeter, using a heat gun to measure the heat generated by the laptop after 15 minutes of strenuous work, and using a mix of real-world and synthetic benchmarks to test how well a laptop performs at various day-to-day tasks. We run all laptops through the Geekbench CPU performance benchmark tests as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities. We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine's hard drive is, a video transcoding test to gauge how well a laptop can cut video and a custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.

We also run every laptop we test through a basic game test using Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm to gauge how good it is at running games compared to other laptops. We use this old game because it runs on a wide variety of laptops across different prices, sizes and operating systems, so it's great for comparing performance. 

Of course when testing dedicated gaming laptops we run benchmarks for many more demanding and popular games, including Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2. For more information on our testing process, check out our guide to how we test.