Happy thanksgivin HVXers. Black Friday question.

therealslimfigge

therealslimfigge

Active member
Happy thanksgiving folks. It's time to camp outside of bestbuy/frys and buy a bunch of cheap stuff. I want to buy a laptop to stream HD footage into and I'm lookin at this right now:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...t&productCategoryId=cat15184&id=1124432597892

It's not bad, just no firewire. I was wondering if one of these would work:

http://www.meritline.com/firaden.html

I don't want to invest in p2 right now because it will depreciate too fast. This laptop (coupled with an external hdd) will be very economical. My question is, do you think it will be able to handle the feed? Since I'm doing firewire through a PCMCIA adapter, will the speed of the transfer be reduced? The laptop harddrive is 5400rpm so I'm not too concerned about that as a bottleneck. Wait, should I be concerned about the hdd?

http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-Toshiba_MK4026GAX_40GB_SUPERSLIM_ATA_100_9_5MM_12MS_5400

It's external write speed is 100Mbps, same as dvcproHD right? Does this mean it won't handle a 1080/24p stream? Will it handle a 720/60p stream? Can't I replace the harddrive?

Gah! Is this a smart investment?

Thoughts? Happy thanksgiving!
 
advice: do not buy any of the equipment you have listed.

The laptop is "pure garbage".

The hard drive is slow, very slow. Waste of money.

Firewire adapter... why...

Good intel celery...er... celeron processor.. perhaps the worst processor to come out in a long time.

There is a reason this computer is $379.00...and quality isn't one of them. It has 256 MB of Ram.. and the vid card uses a shard memory bus... ugh... not only is that horrid.. but it slows the system to a crawl when you are getting large amount of read/writes to ram... and VRAM..


My advice, if your looking for a budget computer.. and want to do video work on it.. buy an iBook G4, or wait until Jan to see if new intel based iBooks etc.. are introduced.

or

bite the bullet and spend your money on a decent PC desktop or Notebook. You'll be doing yourself a favour in the long run.

- Avoid the celeron processor. it sucks, plain n simple.
- Shared video memory = bad idea
- 5400 RPM is standard for most Laptop HD's... this is not a good speed for an external HD. 7200 RPM and above
- Just buy a comp with Firewire already installed.

Highly Recommended:
http://www.apple.com/ibook

The only thing that has a better spec is the BUS speed.. but when you have a horrid processor on the end of a bus... shoving all that data at 400 Mhz isn't going to help matters.
 
Hey thanks for the advice Loki.

I actually have a very nice desktop and my friend will be editing the footage on his new G5 so I'm not too worried about post.

I just want to know if the HVX can stream footage into this laptop. I can upgrade the ram up to 2 gigs if it's necessary. Does the vid card matter? All I want to do is have a place to dump footage into. I've also noticed that on the Japanese HVX spec site, there's a diagram with a PC laptop connected to an HVX via usb. I've been reading a lot of stuff about HD streams over firewire, but what's that diagram all about?

I guess my question is, will this laptop be capable of capturing dvcprohd?
 
Depends on what application you intend to use. On the PC, right now that means Avid or Canopus, so you should go to their sites and see what the minimum system requirements are. I doubt that it would be up to the task, at least without some significant upgrading (especially to RAM).

Now, if you wanted to capture to P2 cards and then use that laptop to offload the P2 card data, yes that'd work -- but I don't think that's what you're asking. So the answer is: figure out which application you'd plan on using, and find out what their minimum requirements are.
 
Not to be a spoil sport, but I really wouldn't recommend that laptop for what you're trying to do.

Loki is pretty spot on in his advice - albeit a little 'strong' in his wording. ;)

You really do want to avoid the Celerons processors. It would definitely need more memory, and a faster drive. I also wouldn't recommend using a PCMCIA based card for FireWire either (it adds an unnecessary chink in the chain, and you'll want to keep that slot open anyway for when you do decide to go P2). :)

There's a number of other reasons I wouldn't recommend that system, but I'm lazy and Loki hit most of them. ;)


Okay, and while I'm not going to personally recommend it without having first tested it out, a MacMini would probably work for simply capturing the DVCPRO-HD material via FireWire. I routinely accomplished that on a 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4 with very similar specs to the MacMini. You'd still want to boost the RAM in it, and drop a faster HDD into it, but it would probably work quite well. It also has built-in firewire & USB2.0 - so you could plug in an external USB 2.0 drive and use the FireWire port for the DVCPRO-HD connection. It also has a GPU with dedicated memory. Plus you'd also have iMovie, iDVD, and all the extra **** they throw in for cool groovy video fun.

I'm not pushing Mac's over a Windows system or anything; just for the money in comparison to the laptop you mentioned the Mini is a much better option. I use both platforms with DVCPRO-HD just about every day of the week; that particular laptop however is pretty low on the spec. chain and is geared more towards homework rather than an HD ingest solution.

Wish I had some better advice for you. If you think you can swing the MacMini option financially, I'll test one of mine out for you just to see how effective it is at capturing a stream of DVCPRO-HD.

You may also wish to try craigslist and see if you can't find a deal.



PS - That may not all be accurate or even legible... it's my annual pre-thanksgiving Vodka bash over here. :)
 
Barry_Green said:
Depends on what application you intend to use. On the PC, right now that means Avid or Canopus, so you should go to their sites and see what the minimum system requirements are.
Click to expand...


Exactly. It sounded to me though like he was going to be doing the editing on a souped up G5 system. So he may be able to get away with a FireWire capture utility rather than a full-on NLE app (although I'm not sure if they're any on Windows that would work).

Okay.... I'm rambling. :)
 
The Mac Mini for Capturing via firewire?
I thought you must log & capture with Final Cut (or iMovie) to shoot the footage in directly...
Almost a super interesting idea though...but it only sports up to 1.42 Gz and I'm not sure the HD isn't 5400 rather than 7200...with only up to 1gig of Ram
...but it's quite compact and cheap
 
Its possible you could use DV Rack with the HD add on to capture but you will probably be sad, that computer is below the minimum specs.

It would be like the time you saved up for that cool new Bard's Tale game, but when you got it home you discovered your dad's ibm clone did not even have a graphics adapter so you were still stuck playing ascii games that you had programmed/copied yourself out BASIC magazine. Or maybe that was just me.
 
Mythfit said:
Its possible you could use DV Rack with the HD add on to capture but you will probably be sad, that computer is below the minimum specs.
Click to expand...

Wait a minute, didn't the first post in this thread read "Happy thanksgivin HVXers..."? And didn't he ask about P2?

To me this would, to me imply that he is asking about the HVX.

DV Rack with the "... HD add on ..." supports HDV not HD (at least not yet) so despite DV Rack being one really cool product, other than SD applications, it doesn't address the HVX (at least as of yet).
 
I'm confused....HD=Hard Drive?....or High Def?.....This is why I'm not getting an HVX yet, I'm more than happy with big D. That and I'm broke.:(
-Ryan
 
Thanks for all the input.

Avid and canopus will not run on this machine, but that's ok. imo, a cheap laptop is a good solution for offloading p2. that means, until i'm ready to invest in p2, i've got myself a good mobile place to work!

It's sorta easy to judge a machine by its chip isn't it? I think judging laptops on the fact that they have a celeron processor is like judging the hvx based on it's ccd resolution. Everyone outside of engineering has a common mentality: if it gets the job done, then who cares about specs?
 
go to the Dell site and look for the Dell outlet section, many good deals on laptops that will suit your needs, they change constantly so keep cheking back as new units come in
 
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