Best laptop for hvx200?

LighthouseMedia said:
As of right now is there ANY options available at any price point whatsoever for PCMCIA adapter for MacBooks at all?
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Yes, the Panasonic PCD20 five-slot reader will work with the MacBook through USB or FW800->FW400. But that's $2,000; a hefty price point, costing twice what a Macbook does.

And, of course, the HVX itself is a card reader that will work with the Macbook.

these readers, will they work or is there another better option?
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No, those little readers will not work at all.

There is a PCMCIA adapter for ExpressCards coming from www.duel-systems.com, but it's not out yet.
 
You guys can offload the p2 data via firewire to your macbook. If you aren't willing to shell out the money for a PC laptop, i'd advise doing that.

I have a two-year old (or just a little less) Dell laptop that I can jam two (2) p2 Cards in and offload, then drag and drop to an external 500gb Drive Via USB2.0.

If I had the money to get more Ram for it I'd cut on it in Edius, but instead it's FCP on the G5.

In short: Get an older PC laptop with like 2gb of Ram, or Offload Via HVX200 > Firewire/USB2.0 and wait until duel-systems has the p2 card thingy.
 
Charli said:
God, I can't believe I didn't like most of those choices. How about this one:

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Specifications-of-Sony-VAIO-17-Widescreen-Notebook-PC-VGN-AR230G/sem/rpsm/oid/164132/rpem/ccd/productDetailSpecification.do#tabs

Overkill? Too much? I need a build in webcam for conference calls.
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The only bad point about that laptop is the slow hard drive -- it's only a 4200RPM drive, which is very rare these days, especially in higher-end laptops. For direct-to-disk captures using DV Rack 2.0 HD or Edius, it will probably be too slow. The video is also not great, using a shared memory architecture, but it would be OK.
 
Thanks, Thoff, for that. I'm still not sold on any one laptop yet. Going to relook
at all the ones Barry pointed out. What laptop do you have, Thoff?
 
THoff said:
The only bad point about that laptop is the slow hard drive -- it's only a 4200RPM drive, which is very rare these days, especially in higher-end laptops.
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Doesn't the fact that it's SATA negate the lower drive speed? I.e. a 4200rpm SATA drive was still better than (or equal to) a higher spinning ATA drive?

And it has two 100GB SATA drives...200GB...pretty neat!
 
Hi there, so i'm also shopping for a laptop, but im only really intending to use mine for offloading P2 cards.

Can anyone tell me if theres any minimum specs I should be aware of for that, and also, this is gonna seem a dumb question but how good are laptop batteries?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=478291

You can see its specs on the technical specifications, of course you'll have to forgive the typical 'fun' uk price.

So would this be more than appropriate for just offloading the p2 cards in the field, and how long do batteries typically last, would it be to get an extra batter or a long life version etc?
 
For offloading cards, all you need is a PCMCIA slot and you'd rather have a relatively speedy hard disk, preferably SATA @ 5400 RPM or faster. Nothing else matters, as far as offloading the cards goes.

The faster the processor and the graphics card, the more runnable P2 Viewer becomes.
 
I just found out that my Laptop has a 5400RPM drive (albeit 40gig lol), so that explains why it offloads so nicely.

Now if I could just clean a lot more than 11gigs off of it. Sheesh.

I think I could cut on this laptop as well with Edius or something. I do a lot of CS2 work and it's processor intensive as well. Guess I'd have to try, though.
 
It's easy enough to replace the internal drive in a laptop, that's what I did with my current laptop. It originally came with a 60GB 4200RPM drive, and I dropped in a 100GB 7200RPM drive.

There are kits specifically designed to swap laptop hard drives, but another option is to use a backup program such as Acronis TrueImage to do it -- that's what I did because I already owned it. The program allows you to make an image backup of your drive, boot from a Recovery CD, and do a "bare metal" restore onto a completely empty drive. It will even allow you to repartition your drive or resize the partitions in the process. There's a fully functional trial version available.
 
Thanks THoff. I'm going to look into that because I want to get a faster/larger drive for my laptop. Amongst another gig of ram at the very least.

I was going to pick up a macbook sooner or later. Guess I have to decide on that next. For now, offloading p2 here will do. (That and another battery!)
 
There is no question that Apple's support for Final Cut Pro will drive the Mac OS solution to be very solid SOON ! The way competition drives technology there is no question about that one. Then again certainly the best technology you can afford is always the best way to start out :-) Ill bet you see some interesting things at NAB next year on both PC and Mac.
 
By the way ... make sure if your going to go Final Cut Studio that the MacBook is going to be supported by Apple. The MacBook Pro is. I know that curently Final Cut Express is supported on the MacBook but not Final Cut Studio. Its the fact that the MacBook uses Intel GMA 950 graphics where as the MacBook PRO uses ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics.
 
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