Gaming is not important if you do video editing. Hardware doesnt need to be very powerful if you dont do 4K or something, which tbh is not needed.
I would say look for a Clevo NV41 laptop as they are supported with Coreboot by 3mdeb, Novacustom, System76, Nitrokey etc. But flashing coreboot requires some knowledge and a hardware programmer.
I cant recommend other brands really. Thinkpads are just a name, good Linux support but their support is nonexistent if you dont pay, and the software updates are not long.
You may want AMD graphics, but I have had bad experience with amd mobile CPUs.
You will want to use
- tlp
- system76-scheduler (or this power management thing)
- autocpufreq
Either one of these.
As a Distro I highly recommend ublue.it they are supporting many models with custom setups like Razer etc, but also main (intel, amd, no extras) or nvidia (proprietary drivers).
Especially if you go with an NVIDIA card, which has advantages, I recommend the system76 tool for switching between internal GPU and dedicated one. And I also recommend only ublue's *-nvidia images, as you can rollback if an update with the drivers breaks something.