These are my favorite implementations of various technologies, which will be updated as I try new products. Cost and value are considered in these recommendations, and different people have various needs, so other products may be better for certain use cases. This is just a list of products I have personal experience with, and trust to do my own work with.
Preferred Thin & Light Laptop: My ZBookX2 is a 4K tablet, with Quad-Core CPU, Quadro card, and Thunderbolt for further expansion. It runs light tasks for hours on battery, and can still open my projects in Premiere and After Effects if needed in a pinch. And I occasionally take advantage of the pen and drawing features as well. Technically discontinued, they can still be picked up through other channels.
Preferred Finishing Workstation: Dell Precision 7910 isn’t significantly different from the HP Z840 on paper, but I can confirm that ours survived hundreds of hours of simultaneous renders from multiple applications, in non-optimal thermal conditions without giving us any serious issues.
Preferred Editing System: The HP Z4 is a much most budget friendly workstation, with most of the same capabilities. While I have a dual processor workstation under my desk at work, I have a Z440 for editing my projects at home. I find it renders at 50% the speed for 10% of the price.
Preferred Storage: Refurbished servers are the cheapest way to deploy mass storage for video projects, and I have built 50-200TB solutions. They can easily be connected to a 10GbE network, to share with all your users.
Preferred Computer Monitor: The Dell U3415W is far and away my favorite display I have ever used, bar none. I thought I would prefer a higher resolution one, but the 3440×1440 is just right to be able to actually see UI components at their default size, while filling your field of view, and giving you are large canvas to work with. There are similar products from other vendors that I haven’t tried, but the Dell one comes pre-calibrated, and with a built-in KVM, so you can use it with multiple systems. Multiple people on our post team are buying these after using them at the office for a few months, they are that good.
Preferred TV: The Sony X850D 55-Inch TV has been a good value for a high quality UHD monitoring option with good color reproduction and HDR support for a decent price. They can be found for under $1K so we were able to afford a few, and have had no issues with them. They even accept a 4096×2160 signal, but crop off the side to display the center cut, as opposed to scaling. They also retain their previous input settings on reboot, so you don’t have to navigate the “smart” menu every time you turn them on.
Preferred Mouse: Logitech’s G700 (or now G700s) is my favorite pointing device. Besides having a lot of buttons in just the right places, the fact that it presents itself to the host system as a keyboard as well allows the button mappings and settings to work with any system without having to install software. Since I move between a lot of different systems, that is critical to being able to use it throughout the day with very little effort. The fact that it works both wired or wireless means it is never out of commission while charging. My previous favorite, the MX1000 did have a unique scroll rocker that I miss, but the charging limitations were always a problem.
