Choosing the right laptop for your visual effects or filmmaking course is a decision you don’t want to get wrong. To create effects at 4K, 6K or even 8K you need an HDR screen with certified color accuracy or your work just won’t hold up when it’s displayed at high resolution.
Similarly, you will want to buy a system with a powerful GPU that has AI and ray tracing cores so that you can make use of these revolutionary features that are transforming 3D work and video editing at an astonishing rate. Miss out on this and you’ll be lagging behind while your coursemates blaze ahead with real-time ray tracing and AI-accelerated workflows.
NVIDIA Studio laptops have you covered. They are purpose-built for creators with vibrant screens, ultrafast memory and of course an NVIDIA RTX GPU with dedicated AI and ray tracing processing cores. Things are changing fast. Gone are the endless days spent in dingy university editing bays. Future filmmakers can get the same power from NVIDIA RTX GPUs that every visual effects Oscar nominee in the last 14 years has used, in portable form.
Tasked with color grading, editing 8K raw footage, 3D modeling, character animation, world-building and working with textures and physics simulation, visual effects and film students—and their laptops—really get put through their paces by today’s courses that serve an ever-more demanding industry. Getting an NVIDIA Studio laptop ensures that your hardware can handle everything you’re going to throw at it, so that you have the time to hone your craft instead of waiting for renders.
Here are some examples.
ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16
With its mighty 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, the ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16 is suitable for editing in 6K and overall one of the most powerful creator laptops out there.
You can buy it with up to 4TB of SSD storage and 64GB of ultra-fast 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, and the screen is a 16-inch 4K (3840 x 2400) OLED HDR 16:10 display perfect for video editing and color grading.
The ProArt Studiobook 16 has won multiple design awards and even meets military grade durability standards so it’s great for working on location.
GIGABYTE AERO 15 OLED Creator laptop
Also powerful enough to handle editing video in 8K, the AERO 15 OLED Creator laptop is based around a 10th Gen Intel Core i9 processor with GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, working with the AERO’s Max-Q technologies—a system-wide optimization approach for high performance laptops.
For maximum performance and efficiency, this laptop has an AI-based power delivery system, and also uses the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning platform to monitor usage patterns and optimize GPU and CPU wattage accordingly.
The screen is a 15.6-inch 4K Samsung AMOLED panel certified with X-Rite Pantone calibration technology for excellent color accuracy.
Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582
Powered by an Intel Core i9 eight-core processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, the Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED is suitable for editing video in 6K and includes the unusual benefit of a secondary touchscreen behind the keyboard.
The primary screen is a 4K (3840 x 2160) OLED HDR touchscreen with excellent color accuracy that’s perfect for creating professional visuals. The ASUS ScreenPad Plus secondary 4K display tilts up to meet the main screen for comfortable viewing, and video and images can be displayed seamlessly across the two panels. ScreenPad Plus-optimized apps assist with multitasking and the precision work for which this extra screen is ideally suited.
Dell XPS 17
Starting at 4.06 lbs with a thickness of 18.54 mm, the Dell is a thin and light laptop that’s very portable for such a powerful machine. CPU options go up to the 14-core 12th Gen Intel Core i9, and it’s based around an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 or 3050 Ti Laptop GPU. This hefty duo is all you need to handle those computationally-intensive tasks, and is good for editing 4K video.
The screen is a 15.6-inch, 3840 x 2400 resolution, 60Hz touchscreen panel with Dell's InfinityEdge ultra-thin bevel and border for a sleek look. It supports upto 2TB of high speed SSD storage, and 64GB DDR5 memory.
Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio
If you like to use a stylus for high-precision work, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio could be a good choice because it’s designed to work with the Surface Slim Pen 2. You can magnetically attach, store, and charge it under the front of the keyboard, and it sends tactile signals to give you the feel of pen and paper.
The Surface Laptop Studio has 14.4-inch, 2400 x 1600 resolution 120Hz touchscreen, and is based around the quad-core 11th Gen Intel Core H35 i7 processor with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, making it suitable for editing 4K video.
You can get a removable SSD of upto 2TB, and the system supports 32GB RAM, with two USB 4.0 and Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro
Suitable for video editing at 4K, the Yoga Slim has a 12th Generation Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, with 32GB DDR5 RAM and up to 1TB SSD storage. And this laptop lives up to its name: it’s just 15.9mm thick and weighs only 3.2lbs.
The display is a 14.5-inch 3K (3072 x 1920) touchscreen hardware calibrated with a color accuracy of Delta E<1, with 100% sRGB color space and volume, 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, and the TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light certification. It has the useful 16:10 aspect ratio which makes space for your menu bars when you’re editing 16:9 videos.
The NVIDIA Studio software suite
Don’t forget that another huge benefit of Studio laptops is that they give you access to the NVIDIA Studio suite of apps which are exclusively available to RTX GPU owners and contain powerful technology to speed up content creation for aspiring artists, students and industry professionals.
NVIDIA Studio suite also encompasses the Omniverse platform for creators of virtual worlds. Omniverse, based on Universal Scene Description (USD) enables creators to connect their favorite 3D tools for more seamless workflows, and enhance their art with AI-powered tools to accelerate time consuming, manual tasks like facial animation, world-building, environmental lighting, and much more.
Then there’s Broadcast, which uses amazing AI tools to clean-up video and audio in real-time, essentially turning any room into a home studio. And Canvas, another AI-powered tool, enables you to draw beautiful, photorealistic landscapes just by sketching.
NVIDIA Studio laptops and popular creative apps are supported by NVIDIA Studio Drivers which come preinstalled and are extensively tested to deliver maximum reliability. Even better, every driver update adds functionality to your system and improves efficiency.
To find out more about what NVIDIA Studio can do for you, check out the weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology accelerates creative workflows.