I am placing a hold on new videos until this new computer arrives. The goal is for all videos going forward on YouTube will have a 4K option. My issue has been anything beyond 1080p FULL HD bogs down my system and it's impossible to edit. Even the 1080p stuff is so slow that something just had to give.

I've been slogging along on machines that were made for internet surfing, not professional video production. The catalyst was buying a new 4K action camera and deciding to shoot in 4K at the recent Dallas Guitar Show. While I had 4K capability all along with my Sony AX53, which I used over the bench, I didn't see a need to shoot in 4K for amp repairs. It just didn't seem worth the additional time and disk space. Plus, 1080p always looked pretty great to me, especially on the devices most people watch on, like phones.

Deciding to shoot all that video in 4K was an attempt to see how good the camera could be at full capability. Little did I know, when trying to compress that video down to 1080p for editing, my computer would take abut 5 HOURS to render about an hour worth of video, which was the straw that broke the camel's back.

So here's what I got coming. It's an MSI Katana. They bumped the price up by almost $200 AFTER I bought it! Mistake in the listing??? I'm guessing yes. Before spotting this one on Amazon, I bought n HP Envy with the same i9 processor, but with a lesser Geforce RTX 4060, 32gb DDR5 RAM, a 120hz monitor, and 1TB SSD. It was a nice machine which would have worked, but after tax, it cost over $1600. So the Katana for $1400 AFTER TAX looked like a steal. I sent the HP back today and bought the MSI instead. I splurge so rarely on anything that my credit card company put a hold on the payment, flagging it as possible fraud. What's worse, they didn't send me a text letting me know. Only an email (which I never check). Luckily I caught it just in time before they upped the price on the thing. PHEW!