Hi,

Just got my mavic air and i'm trying to edit some footage but i'm running on a old processor, working with a i7-4510u dual core at 2.0Ghz (3.1Ghz at turbo boost), a GeForce 840M and 12 GB of DDR3-1600 with a 256Gb SSD.
I've read that for editing you shound't go bellow a 6 core processor, an 1060 Geforce and 32Gb of DDR4, also with a SSD. Any thoughts about this? I'm guessing a laptop with a 6 core i5 and a Geforce 1050/1050Ti plus 16Gb of DDR4 and an SSD won't cut it? Compared to a 6 core ryzen processor desktop computer even with just a GTX1060 3GB for example.
Thanks.

Hi, for that same reason I purchased a new PC this spring when I got my Mavic Air. After quite some research I chose a desktop PC with AMD Ryzen 1600X, GeForce GTX 1050Ti, 16 GB Ram, 250 GB Samsung SSD  and a 1 TB Toshiba HD (for storage). I found this to be a good setup at still a reasonable price and I am very satisfied with the performance.

I'm using an old i7 (K875) from 2010 with 16GB Ram and a SSD. Graphics is a 100 dollar card. No problem with 4K editing. Ok the export is slow, but that's fine with me.

I used an Alienware 15" laptop.

Firstly an SSD is essential in general.  No way would i touch any type of computer for any task without an SSD these days.

For video you need ram, lots of it.  I have 16gb but more would be nice.

Actual editing requires some CPU and a lot of GPU *if* you use certain effects and so on.  For rendering in most cases the vast majority of horsepower required comes from the CPU.

I've got an i7-6700 CPU and a GeForce1060 installed here.  In addition i have a 1TB NVMe SSD along with a 1TB conventional HDD and 16GB ram in the laptop.

As a rough guide a 30 second clip i can edit in real time with no dropped frames (4k 30 fps source) and it takes about 3 minutes to render with basic lumetri effects.  If i add NeatVideo noise reduction (sadly essential with the mavic pro) that render time goes up to 35 minutes or so for the same clip.

Its perfectly acceptable, i can edit the clips with ease, queue up the files and leave them all to render overnight etc.

Ultimately if you have a slower video card you may need to create proxies to edit.  These allow you to edit on a low res version without lag and dropped frames but still export the final result in full.

A slower CPU isn't as much of an issue as its generally render time which can always be done overnight if required.

There is no absolute hardware needed, it's just a matter of speed. I've edited on old machines and my new Alienware and while I can see the difference in speed, the resultant video is the same. Just a matter of what you can tolerate and how big your piggy bank is I think.