Editing EX1 files on a laptop?

L

lowep

Well-known member
I am trying to figure out if I can process and edit my EX1 clips with a fast laptop computer or need a desktop system?

The reason I am in doubt is because a computer technician told me today that even though a laptop or desktop computer may have similar processors (eg i5, i7) that desktop systems are much more robust and better suited to high end processing tasks such as video editing. So would like to hear from anyone who uses a high end laptop to process your EX1 clips?

Pardon if this question belongs in a different neck of the forum
 
oooh boy you just brought me back a few years to a fun ol' time i had with that very same situation.

I was using a laptop as my main edit station, i believe it was a dual core dell latitude, it was a powerful thing for its time. But it met its match when i first got a hold of the EX1.

It wasn't actually the latptop's fault. see because back then, we were still being weened off HDV, which NLE's had just finally started handling well, but the EX1 apparently was different enough that NLEs needed a better method of processing them(unless of course you just transcoded to an intermediate)

And the first thing i was shooting with the EX1 was a feature, so it was balls to the wall. It was a very lovely PITA, that again could have been avoided with proxies or intermediates. Eventually, adobe released some updates for premiere which VASTLY improved the native editing ability of the EX1 files on that laptop, and i think the bigger bottleneck was the storage drives, we had no usb3, firewire just wasn't what the unobtainable fibrechannel goodness was, etc...

so to finally get to the point, a modern laptop with an SSD or at least thunderbolted/usb3'ed to a fast drive i think would handle EX1 files just fine. ESPECIALLY if you're editing in premiere and that laptop has a cuda card enabled.
 
Last July I worked on a documentary in France with two F55's shooting 4K for four weeks. We traveled 3800 miles and stayed in 20 different hotels. A unique feature of the F55 is that it can record 4K files and XDCAM HD422 50 Mbps files simultaneously. Each night I had to ingest and backup eight 128GB SxS cards. Then I had to open Premiere CS6 and import the XDCAM 50 Mbps files to edit, color grade, mix the audio, and export a 5-7 minute highlights video for CBS.com.

The computer I used? A refurbished 13" MacBook Pro with only 4GB of ram that cost under $1000. So yeah, a laptop is perfectly capable of handing the relatively tiny 35Mbps XDCAM files that the EX1 records. No problem at all. Just make sure it has USB3.0 or Thunderbolt ports.
 
As long as its a mac . I do it all the time on Final Cut pro. If you need another program it may get tricky. I'm trying to figure out how to do it for imovie right now
 
Doug Jensen said:
Each night I had to ingest and backup eight 128GB SxS cards. Then I had to open Premiere CS6 and import the XDCAM 50 Mbps files to edit, color grade, mix the audio, and export a 5-7 minute highlights video for CBS.com.
Click to expand...

How the heck Doug did you do that each night after shooting eight 128GB cards? Thanks also Darren and Leni for the good advice. Taking into consideration Doug´s experience the capacity of the operater seems of more consequence than the computer
 
Not all eight cards were recorded to their capacity each day, so that helped. But I could ingest and make two HDD backups of each card in about 25 minutes, so the average was a little less than 4 hours per night of ingesting. Whenever possible I tried to eat in the hotel restaurant so that I could go back and forth to my room every half hour.
 
I'm doing casual editing on a 5 year old Toshiba 1.8gHz core2 laptop w/ 4GB ram and a Radeon HD 3470 chipset with 256MB of ram. No problem handling basic editing and playback functions in Lightworks with any normal video codec, including uncompressed broadcast 4:2:2 AVI files. It doesn't always play well with highly compressed codecs like AVC or H.264. The less compression the better.
The key is the drives. Your video absolutely has to be on separate internal or external drives, not your OS system drive. I'm running 2 internal 500GB 7200 rpm drives with one dedicated for media files and firewire for external camera capture or drives.
I would not expect this setup to work with complex multi-video track edits or heavy VFX. But for simple single or dual video tracks with cuts, dissolves, titling, color correction, and basic audio mixing it works just fine.
Any current quad core laptop with e-sata, USB3, or Tbolt interfaces for external drives would run rings around my old setup.
 
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