Huawei Matebook Pro X Laptop – Travel Videographer (Video Editor) Review & Transitoning from Apple Mac to Windows
April 2020 Update: After 1.5 years of traveling and working with this laptop from Vancouver, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia from airbnbs, cafes, home office, and cowork space I have a more informed review.
This laptop is definitely a joy to bring to the cafes or just working on the fly. I can just close the lid making it easy to close down and start up again. It’s light making it a lot easier to travel with in terms of the weight and carrying it through airports.
If I need a proper video editing setup I’ll connect it to a monitor. The dongles support my workflow with multiple hard-drives and connecting to televisions and monitors. This laptop can handle my client work from editing 4K footage multiple camera angles in Adobe Premiere 2020. I was concerned with the conflict between the US and China and whether that would impact my access to Microsoft updates and other american platforms. So far so good, but it’s unclear whether future versions will be impacted. Other than that I’m overall happy with my decision to go with huawei.
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In this post I review and share the Pros and Cons of the Huawei Matebook Pro X 13.9 Inch 16GB 500GB laptop from the perspective of someone who Video edits 4K Video Footage and Travels and works from home, co-work spaces and Cafe’s. This article will be useful for Video editors or Apple Macbook Pro owners thinking of switching from IOS to Windows. I’ve use the Imac and Macbook Pro computers to edit using Final Cut Pro X since 2011. Before than I was brought up on Windows even climbing the corporate ladder in Canada as an IT Manager supporting a Windows Enterprise Environment. Politics and brand loyalty aside how is this laptop and the transiton back to Windows.
Build and Hardware
This is a well-built sexy laptop. It looks good, feels good, and is a joy to use and carry around. After carrying around the Macbook Pro 15 inch around the world this laptop makes zipping out to a cafe or the pool really easy to work on the go. It loads up fast and the battery lasts all day. The laptop comes with a useful dongle providing another USB3 port, HDMI, and VGA. It’s missing a much needed SD Card reader, but I purchased a USB card reader for $15 CDN. Another much purchase is a USB 3 with gigabit ethernet if you have lots of hard-drive and have a need for reliable stable internet. I also purchase a full-size keyboards as batting out blog posts on this keyboard can strain your wrists as I’m used to a 15 inch keyboard. For desktop Video editing or watching movies or youtube I use the HDMI port to connect to an LCD monitor or TV. The Final adjustment I did was to install the bootcamp drives on Apples site to allow me to use my Apple magic mouse on the Huawei laptop using bluetooth. This will also free up a valuable USB 3 port. With these add-ons I’m set to go. Future add-ons may include an external SSD USB-C hard-drive, and perhaps an external EGPU.
Software
We are living in the cloud era where you no longer need to rely on expensive Microsoft Office to do most things. These days I choose to use Google docs and google sheets on Google chrome. Yes google drive to store stuff in the cloud. For Video Editing there was a learning curve for using Adobe Premiere. I opted into the Adobe Creative Suite and I am now using the current version of Adobe Photoshop, lightroomg, and Adobe Premiere CC 2019. It took me a couple of months of extensive editing and practice to learn how to do the fundamentals like trimming, color grading, transitons, titles, encoding, and exporting. If I can do it you can can too.
Video Editing Experience and differences beween Final Cut Pro X
Adobe Premiere is a different workflow to edit a Video. It’s quick to import Videos, but you can quickly starting working with clips in the time-line. It’s nice to find more text graphics and color grading options than Final Cut Pro X. You can easily download more fonts for free on Adobe Creative cloud so I can see the power with using this software. The interface is not as easy to use, but you can learn it over time.
Summary
I’m happy with my purchase. There are some changes to deal with, but I definately feel like I got better value with this product. It is a pleasure to use and travel with this laptop whether it’s from country to country, taking it out on a day shoot, or working at a cafe. I opted to keep my old Macbook Pro as it is still running strong to do complex multi-camera edits and to have a second machine if I hire additional help. Apple is definately pissing off some people with their pricing and bullying their customers to adopt their new standards including myself. You can definately save some money upfront by purchasing this setup although because Final Cut Pro X is a one-time purchase you should factor this into your 5 years costs. Although it took a month and a bit to get up to speed on Adobe Premiere I know it’s a great idea to learn another popular video editing suite. If you decide the purchase the Huawei laptop and need help transitioning let me know.
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