From a Mac user: Isn't a PC laptop just plain easier?

S

SamG

Active member
Hello all,

It looks to me like some people are trying hard to make the Powerbooks, Macbooks and Macbook Pros work with P2 cards.

I use a Mac and edit with FCP, but isn't a PC laptop easier to use in the field?

1. PC laptops are less expensive.

2. Panasonic offers P2 software for use on PC.

3. PC laptops have PCMCIA slots.

4. I know of at least one PC laptop (HP I think) that holds TWO internal hard drives thus obviating the need for an external drive in the field and all the extra headaches that an external drive can bring.

Again I use a Mac G5, but I think a PC in the field is better than a Powerbook in the field. The only thing I can see going for the Powerbook is direct capture to FCP.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks.
 
Its purely preferential.

I may not have P2 viewer...but I don't find a desire for it either.

I get by just fine with my G4 powerbook on location. Until the PC Express adapter is released for the Macbook Pro...well that is my only concern with that laptop in the field.
 
yes.. its the way to do it.. but if your using a pc in the field and only to offload, a p2store, although a little more cash, is a much more romantic option.
 
Except that with a P2 Store you lose the ability to keep everything really organized.

Something I'm hoping is fixed with a firmware upgrade to the camera in the furture....:keeps wishing:
 
I use my PC laptop in the field too. Especially if there's a wet spot of grass and I need something to sit on--or there's a puddle or something and I've got my good shoes on. I'll just put my AVID Express Pro equipped PC in the puddle and step onto that. My shoes stay dry and my feet stay toasty. Other times, there will be spills or miscellaneous refuse on the ground and I need something level to put my FCP equipped Mac on, I'll prop up the toshiba with rocks and stuff and them dust it off and settle my Mac in on that. I think of it as a really fancy shim.

In all seriousness, I waisted so much time and energy on my PC desktop / laptop / stinking AVID Express that I don't care how much energy it takes to get the data off my camera. At least, I know what I'm up against. My PC experience just had so many Gremlins / variables and everyone just points fingers. "Oh, that's the OS." "Oh no, that's the software." "Oh, no that's the video card." "Oh, no you've got the wrong type of RAM." "Yes, but we don't support that support upgrade." "Hello, thank you for calling Dell. How can I provide you with excellent service?" and etc.

And the knee jerk reaction is to say what I used to say, "Yeah, yeah. Well all that crap happened to you for a reason. It's because your a child tryin' to walk amongst men and blah, blah, blah."

Anyhow...that's why I don't use my PC.
 
The P2 Store is no doubt a great solution for the solo and/or run and gun shooter.

However, the PC laptop comes with TWO 100 gig drives and is less expensive.

I honestly hate the idea of bringing a laptop into the field, but that's quite a bit of storage. (I really do hate the idea of lugging a laptop around.)

Thanks again.
 
PC's have PCMCIA.... Time to relook at PC laptops..... Many new ones do NOT have PCMCIA now. That technology is dead to PC manufacturers.
 
I'm a Mac guy, but the only compelling reason to buy/bring a PC into the field is if there was a HD version of DV Rack + P2 Viewer. Now that would be nice. The PC becomes much more of a tool (client monitor, etc.) than just an extra (over-the-top) P2 Store.
 
I don't think a PC is cheaper either. Go to dell and make a Laptop that equals the macbook pro and the price is the same or more. Try it you'll be suprised.
 
I dont think any new core duo PC laptop has a PCMCIA slot.. I think core duo and expresscard go hand in hand.. probably the new chipset...
 
SamG said:
The P2 Store is no doubt a great solution for the solo and/or run and gun shooter.

However, the PC laptop comes with TWO 100 gig drives and is less expensive.

I honestly hate the idea of bringing a laptop into the field, but that's quite a bit of storage. (I really do hate the idea of lugging a laptop around.)

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

With the laptop (PC... I've never used a Mac... can't make comments there), you can review footage on the field with appropiate NLE after you do the dump.

The edited footage can be displayed to clients etc later.

The laptop performs many functions wonderfully. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

As for NLE's, I'll stick to the Canopus Edius... it seems to be pretty reliable so far.
 
I recently worked on a drama with the hvx and found the pc laptop (2 of them) absolutely essential.
We had 2 4 gig cards 2 laptops (with external drives) with p2 viewers and a large wall projector connected to one laptop in a viewing room.
The end project was edited in fcp on mac, the pc formatted external drives were picked up by the latest osx tiger no problem (we were all shocked and happy this has been fixed from previous osx versions).
 
Lots of nice comments/suggestions/observations here.

Not that I'm pro-PC or anything, but I don't see a reason why the PC must match the Power/Mac-book spec for spec. Unless I am mistaken about the workflow, all the laptop must do is dump footage to a hard drive. That isn't processor intensive or tough to do. A cheap PC lappy from Office Depot should do the trick. Again, unless I am mistaken.

As for the Intel Core Duo and Singles not using PCMCIA, that's a good point.

As a side note to these workflow questions and answers I offer the following...

I observe what it takes to shoot with the HVX and the forthcoming RED which we are all very excited about and wonder how certain things will shake out.

On the high end I see available money shrinking for commercials and music videos (nothing new there for the music videos).

On the low to middle end I see incredible technologies coming available such as HVX, RED, and others that allow us to create high end deliverables.

On the low to middle end I see crew size growing not shrinking due to these new technologies, but I don't see shooting budgets going up to allow for the extra crew. I bet this is especially true for those working in local commercials.

Once tethered to a laptop the HVX requires a mini Viper-type crew to operate.

I read on these fine DVX User boards a lot of folks saying the solution to much of these problems is to just hire a dedicated P2 Card Dumper (a new credit perhaps?), or two dumpers, or just bring along a laptop, or two laptops, or a hard drive array for direct-to-disc capture and I again wonder who in the heck is paying for all of this? It's all fine if you are executing your own production and can hire crew for pizza and beer.

The Little Guys of the production world are racing to be like the Big Guys and the Big Guys are looking at the books and realize they must scale back and be more like the Little Guys. Will both groups join happily in the middle? Or, will they crash?

The other funny thing is that many of the new production opportunities will be for things like cell phones which do not require HD and will not have comfortable production budgets.

I bit of a nebulous ramble from me. I apologize. I guess you could say I have had budgeting and the big picture view of it all on my brain lately.

Hey, I hijacked my own thread! :)
 
tourneestudio said:
I'm a Mac guy, but the only compelling reason to buy/bring a PC into the field is if there was a HD version of DV Rack + P2 Viewer. Now that would be nice. The PC becomes much more of a tool (client monitor, etc.) than just an extra (over-the-top) P2 Store.
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The PC laptop currently slaughters the Mac laptop for HVX usability. DVC Rack is incredible -- it's only in beta right now, but this is a must-have for HVX users. Full-screen full-frame-rate full-resolution monitoring, including the ability to way zoom in on the shot (think "focus assist" on steroids) plus disk recording, waveform and vectorscope, instant clip playback, split-screen freeze-frame capability for lining up/matching shots, etc... The P2 Viewer is free and while it's not a very good program, at least it runs, and you can sort through and annotate your HVX MXF files using it. And DVC Rack will let you capture and save files in Quicktime format, so they're edit-ready when you drop them on the FCP timeline. Yes FCP can do "log & capture", and it'll give you a low-res low-frame-rate preview window, but it's nothing at all like what DVC Rack does.

And having access to a PCMCIA slot is of course magnificent too, for as long as that lasts. And shortly duel-systems will have a PCMCIA->ExpressCard adapter.

I think the ultimate solution is an MBP running BootCamp, with FCP on the OSX partition, and DVC Rack on the WinXP partition, and a duel-systems PCMCIA->ExpressCard adapter (or, alternately, a P2 Store, which can function as a PCMCIA pass-thru slot too). Since I've already got EDIUS as well, I'll have FCP and EDIUS, DVC Rack and P2 Viewer, all on one mobile platform.

If you could only have one kind of laptop, I'd say PC is the way to go, especially with a PCMCIA slot; just copy the files onto an external FAT32 hard disk if you want to use them on your FCP desktop. But if you can stretch it to accomodate an MBP, that's the future. That's the way it should be done.
 
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Barry_Green said:
I think the ultimate solution is an MBP running BootCamp, with FCP on the OSX partition, and DVC Rack on the WinXP partition, and a duel-systems PCMCIA->ExpressCard adapter (or, alternately, a P2 Store, which can function as a PCMCIA pass-thru slot too).
Click to expand...


At least in my view, this is exactly correct. The 2 GHz or 2.16 Ghz 15 or 17 inch MBP with these capabilities is unbeatable.

I've been in desktop video for 14 years, but don't have the acumen or range of experience of many of you here.

But I do know hardware, and I believe Barry has hit it squarely on the head.

FCP integration with the HVX200 in NTSC land is fantastic. To be able to boot to WinXP and run DV Rack full strength on the same machine is also fantastic. Apple's hardware is a class act.

The key factor is p2 ingestion on the fly through the duel adapter for the ExpressCard/34. That makes or breaks this deal
 
SamG said:
Honestly, are folks bringing along assitant editors as part of the production crew?
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Our second AC/loader officially became the "P2 wrangler" on our last shoot. We only had two 4GB P2 cards for the entire shoot and yet never ran into a bottleneck of lack of storage one single time. We kept one card in the camera and one out at all times. As the first card filled all the way up, we'd take it out and hand it to the loader who would give us the clean one. As we'd prep for the next shot, he would copy the MXFs to an external hard drive, import the MXFs to FCP to a different drive (effectively converting them into QT movies for instant editing/review) and creating a redundant backup for security purposes, rename those .mov files for organization/ease of use, and then burn the original MXFs to DVD (since they're also 4GB) for a third, non-crashable backup. This system worked like a charm - we never had one single hiccup with losing footage, we always had a fresh card ready to go when the current one was full, and best of all, at the end of the shoot, the entire day's worth of footage was "captured," organized, redundantly backed up, and ready to edit by the time we wrapped. I've never been on a set where the workflow was so easy and wonderful - film or digital - and having that loader/second AC/P2 wrangler/assistant editor (whatever you want to call it!) was completely neccessary for making that happen. So to answer your question, yes, I'd say if you have the resources or crew to make that happen, it's an incredibly smart (and potentially necessary) choice.

I do find it interesting that a lot of people think that a PC laptop "crushes" a Mac laptop for handling P2 footage in the field, however. I'm a completely PC guy myself - I even bought a new laptop about 9 months ago in anticipation of the HVX/P2 with a PCMCIA slot and 1920x1200 resolution to handle the huge HD files. But since we're editing in FCP, I find my laptop next to useless for dealing with the footage. Sure, the P2 viewer is okay... you can see your stuff on it... but other than using the laptop to store the footage or back it up, it would've just created another step in the chain and we'd have to find a way to get all of that footage off of the laptop and onto a Mac-compatible hard drive for editing. If the majority of users who think that a PC laptop is "better" for the P2 workflow are using a PC NLE to edit their footage, maybe that's a different story... but if you're using FCP to cut your film (which I was under the impression most people are), then I don't see how a PC laptop is beneficial at all. Having the files already imported and organized into the NLE at the end of the day was a total godsend.
 
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