I think for basic editing anything you can find for sale nowadays will be fine.


I'm doing some fairly complex stuff with an Acer Aspire 5742Z with a 24" external monitor and a bunch of USB hard drives full of 4:2:2 Prores from a Black Magic Pocket. I just use proxies and render overnight...

...and now I notice the necropost...

All that i5, i7, ... stuff is not necessary for basic editing (however, it will of course improve the user experience!). I use a 10y old laptop with a 2x1.8GHz centrino duo (32bit), 2GB ram and a Nvidia GeForce Go 7400. With effects the video does not play fluently, so the workflow becomes a bit more complicated, but it just works. I made some very nice videos with this setup. You may already have something similar or better. I hope of course to upgrade in the future, as I would like to do more complicated editing.
For rendering, at least 4GB of ram is advisable. I do rendering single core because with two threads, it uses to much memory (>2GB), and is (due to swapping) slower than dual core. So for serious rendering 8GB shouldn't be a luxury. A SSD is also said to give big improvements.

Without doubt an i5 or i7 will be better, but kdenlive is well-written efficient software that also works well on less powerful systems.

Regarding the screen, FHD is nice. 1280x800 is a bit on the small side, but 1920x1080 is much, much better. Sometimes I also use a dual screen setup, with the preview on my external screen and the timeline, effects, files, waveforms, ... on my (smaller) laptop screen. I then disable proxies for accurately grading and sharpening footage.

I think kdenlive is the best free (and one of the better if compared to non-free alternatives!) video editors available. Davinci Resolve lite is also free, but doesn't run well on low resource systems and has a steep learning curve. With GPU support, kdenlive will be even better in the future.

Basic editing laptop or computer needs a Core i5 processor with around 4GB graphics card, 6GB RAM and a good storage. But, one should opt for a little higher specs like Core i7/6GB VRAM graphics/16GB DDR4 RAM/512GB SSD and FHD or 4K display. With these specs, a laptop will run editing software at its best with full features.