Laptop and vegas

A

Andrew_Mclean

Member
Hi all,
We will be editing / shooting an indie movie in January. Thing is we will be in the mountains / jungle. The producer wants us to edit the movie each day. I am not taking my computers there so we will purchase a laptop plus external hard drives to do the job. (we have pro tv monitor)
Could someone recommend a laptop that will be up to the job.
Or some specs we should follow.
Oh we have 2000 dollars to spend on the laptop. (plus external hard drives)

Thanks in advance
AMC
 
I have a HP zd8110 Newer model very sluggish (Pentium 4 630 HT)
I also have an older hp zd7360 (pent 4 3.2 GHZ HT) and it is very stable and faster than the above.
Laptops are sluggish because of the 5400 rpm harddrives so if you could get a laptop with a 7200 rpm it would be great and also if you could get a laptop with 2 hard drives that would be a plus. If you use magic bullet 2.0 get one with an Nvida video card. It is 4 times faster than other cards when rendering. Get the widescreen LCD it is nice when editing. So is a logitech cordless mouse. Seagate externals are good. my .02
 
I have a Sony K37 (discontinued) and it's very fast, has a 7200 spin drive... For DV, the 5400 vs 7200 makes little difference unless you're dealing with multiple streams.
The Nvidia card won't benefit you one way or the other with Vegas. Bullet can't access the OGL in the card when used in Vegas.
Look at the VAIO K series, the faster M series are quite good. Anything with the M Series processors regardless of the brand will give reasonable battery life. Anything with a P4 in it will suck up juice regardless.
I'd avoid Toshiba, just because they're known for video editing compatibility probs, but Sony, IBM, Fuji, Alienware (which is a re-label) and Dell have received high marks from various Vegas users around the globe.
 
Thanks for the info.
As well as the DVX100 camera (use firewire for capture) we may also shoot some scenes with a sony beta sp camera.
Will a laptop have the juice to handle this. Capture using a component capture card for the sony beta sp. The camera has a BNC output. Will the hard drive speeds be an issue more now?

Thanks alot
 
me too

me too

I am in the same boat as you. About 2000.00 american to spend. I was looking at an HP p4 3.02 HT 17 inch widescreen with 100 gig drive wireless G ATI Graphics w 128 meg video 2 gig system mem.

2 things I can see right away. The drives are 4800 speed not 5400 because of the heat dissapation probems. Also battery life is about 1.5 hours max (non-rendering in vegas). Rendering I think it's something like 10 minutes and 'poof'.

Now all the other machines I see use centrino mobile tech with 7200 drives but the centrino clocks at 1.4 to 2.0 gig. However the internal memory cache is quite larger than the p4 meaning it is more effecient.

That being said normal functions s/b faster than 1.4 - 2.0 becuase of that but in rendering video I believe it will not help as much. In that the p4 plugged in will win (and get pretty bloody hot).

Thing is, this is pretty useless as a laptop to use in the field shooting as the battery will take a dump too soon. But as one to have plugged in at the office editing and then take home it could be sweet (and heavy at 9.5 pounds).

What do you all think? I'll be running Vegas 6.0 as well and DVD Arch 3.0.
Any other suggestions?
 
Actually I just found out that most notebooks come with a 6 cell battery.
Buying a 12 cell battery will yeild about double the time you can use it unplugged.
 
The 12 cell battery has 120% more capacity than the 6 cell (8.8Ahr vs. 4.0Ahr), if that helps. I definitely want the 12 cell.
 
i would look at an Alienware laptop maxed out for serious online editing.. if you think 4000rpm drives are slow now and low pentiums choke.. wait till you start playing with DVCproHD.
 
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