laptop

emmajane

emmajane

New member
hi all. i'm sure this question has been around before but i'm at a loss to find it. so if someone can point me in the right direction then i would be grateful!

If it doesn't - here goes (opens can of worms):

I'm a filmmaker, used to shoot Panasonic 100A mini-dv, no problem editing that on my trusty old desktop. But I've just bought a 5D, and this desktop PC aint gonna play ball with these big files, I think it's the GFX card that's losing it's mind.

But as for what to get next - I will need to be mobile - I'd like to edit on the fly as I'm going abroad. I know the easy but not cheap answer would be a Macbook Pro. But because of my budget I would like to hear about other options and wondering if there are any faithful Acer / Toshiba or similar advocates out there who could advise / guide.

Does anyone out there have a reliable non-Mac laptop that will handle Premiere + 5D footage with ease?

Here's a spec I got sent by a friend today for the Acer Aspire 5742:

Processor - Intel Core i3 - 2.4 GHz
RAM - 3 GB
Hard Drive - 250 GB
Operating System - Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Graphics - Intel

it looks pretty spicy, but will I need a different graphics card?

OK - i look forward to hearing from people. Just lost in the quagmire at the moment on the wrong side of understanding (and finances) on these things - so any help / pointers are much appreciated!

thanks
Emma Jane
:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
just trawling about everywhere i can and presuming i don't know enough about editing to answer all my own questions either.
for example, if i'm only editing for the web, can I convert the footage so the laptop can handle it, like you would if using FCP.
any Premiere users out there wth a handy workflow to edit compressed footage and then export the final cut as HD? using EDL or what have you.
would this cut down on my GFX / RAM needs but still export the HD high quality footage? not that i could watch it if the spec was too low! :)
 
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Hi

Congratulations on the 5D - a wonderful tool.

We are discussing:
Laptops and Adobe Premiere CS5 (hopefully we are talking CS5, otherwise upgrade is your first purchase reccomendation).
Budget is a consideration.

Sometimes what you get REALLY matters. This is one of those times. There are count them TWO REVOLUTIONS going on for laptops right now.
First: Adobe has the Mercury Playback engine. This harnesses your new Nvidia 1 GB GPU to do much of the heavy lifting speeding up things immensely.
Second: Intel has Sandy Bridge CPUs. These CPUs have video decoding and transcoding built into the CPU at a level never before. Immense jump.

So you should be looking for a Sandy Bridge / Nvidia CPU laptop that you can afford.
Here is one just as an example: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/laptops/364672/intel-sandy-bridge-for-laptops

To get an idea of model numbers for CPU go here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4084/intels-sandy-bridge-upheaval-in-the-mobile-landscape
This is a quite technical article but feel free to limit yourself to the charts on the first page and the different model numbers and core threads.
One note: The single I3 offering lacks HyperThreading (additional virtual cores, one virtual core is worth roughly half a real core for your purposes) and might be best skipped. Premiere CS5 loves more CPU cores.

Please try here for great information on GPU: http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm
Again feel free to read or skip most of this. But do look at the charts that show the different GPU models. It is in this article that you are shown how to perform the perfectly okay hack to enable your Nvidia GPU with Premiere CS5. Hack is very easy and not scary. Also can be reversed at any time.

Other considerations. If you can swing it try to get 7200 RPM hard drives (hard drive rotating speed) instead of the 5400 RPM ones. SSDs (Solid State Drives) are good but usually small and expensive. Your LCD screen will usually be a relatively cheap 1024 x 768. 1920 x 1080 high quality screens are available but likely way above your price point. Premiere CS5 likes lots of memory (RAM) feed it accordingly. 8GBs is a good starting place.

But you do what you have to do with the budget you have. If you get into Nvidia and Sandy Bridge you are ahead of almost everyone else becasue this revolution just fully got started Jan 5 2011 with the official Sandy Bridge release. Mercury is almost a year old I think.

Good luck. I am sure you will get other great help from this forum, some very knowledgeable folk are here for you.
 
Hi

About transcoding to an intermediate codec to reduce the specs on the computer needed.

Yes - but at a cost. Every time you recompress (unless to a lossless codec which would be too big a file for a laptop most likely) you lose quality.
Why buy a great camera and carefully learn your craft and then lower your production standards in the editor. Well as you imply one good reason is $$ for an editing machine. You mention compressing and then returning to HD and using an EDL. This way of editing has mostly gone by the wayside as computers have obtained the power to edit the actual footage in real time (not accounting for the rendering time). I believe that you might very well be able to make your way into a machine that will allow you to work natively and happily with H.264 footage (from the 5D) right on the Premiere Timeline.

If not you can convert to an intermediate codec, edit and then convert again to your final output format. I won't dive into this huge topic of which codec as it starts very technical discussions. I would look first to avoid the long transcode times and find a machine that will allow you to work natively and have the best of all scenarios.

Good Luck
 
I'm a mac user so keep in mind my experiences are based on intel & PPC mac machines, and I'm not about to go into a mac vs. PC debate or even suggest which way you choose, but here's a Mac user's thoughts on your needs:

Transcoding and staying at 1080p (but to an edit friendly format) is a different animal that transcoding and down-rezzing to SD.

On the mac, transcoding to prores and editing at 1080p is pretty seamless on a modern machine, and you can jump through a LOT of transcodes/renders - from raw footage to prorez, through AE & render and back to the timeline to a final render, say - and the footage holds up remarkably (and there's plenty of test reports that appeared when prorez first hit the scene, people transcoding back & forth dozens of times & pixel peeping). The impact on footage quality really comes from knowing grading and effects and staying within tolerable limits, not from transcoding (as long as you retain a lot of pixels).

Some people feel there's a noticeable hit going from RGB to Prorez the first time around - for that the 5dtoRGB (free) transcoder is pretty sweet. But for day to day stuff, I've done plenty of broadcast wrok with MPEG streamclip, and batching several full cards of Canon footage to prorez is pretty quick - I hit "go" and then finish unpacking my gear or grab a coffee. And much of the time, I go ahead and transcode to 720p as I do a lot of stuff in AE and it is a remarkable speedup, 1080 vs. 720, even on a current Mac Pro. And my original RGB footage is archived and my AE files are 1080, so I can always output a 1080 edit without much work.

I do a lot of web-only work but always in 720p; the last "Web" ad I did ended up on comedy central for a several week run, and 720 was just fine for them (and the client said from the start "we can't afford broadcast, just do it SD") (So, as an aside, do work your clients can't afford NOT to broadcast). At this point I generally use 1080 for keying but render down to 720 - perhaps as time goes on I'll see a need for always doing 1080. There's really no need to work SD on a reasonably current machine.

I assume there's a Windows workflow similar to what I've described above that would work on a reasonably priced laptop (if the next-gen tech described in earlier posts breaks the budget, say).

And yes, upgrading to a top-shelf NLE is important either way - premiere, FCP, etc.

As far as wanting a mobile system to edit while traveling? You will give up a lot on power, storage and upgradeability, so weigh if you will truly be editing in a hotel room or whatever.

And as far as Mac Vs. PC: if you go laptop, it will likely be more than an editor - it'll be how you archive work, communicate, write, even retouch and manage personal and professional photos, etc. Mac users tend to love the mac "experience", PC users tend to feel comfortable in a Windows variant. Your situation may warrant an overall thought to which environment you want to do "all of the above" in - you may find it's all better on a recent Mac, or that your comfort in Windows would get you working in that "second nature I'm not thinking just doing" realm faster.

In short you ought to be able to edit on either platform, affordably and happily, so consider the ancillary benefits of each side as well - good luck.
 
Hi
Emmajane seems to have fled, but for others an update.

Intel just announced this AM a Billion dollar recall of Sandy Bridge "Cougar" chips.
Cougar is the Hard Drive Controller on the motherboard (Sata 6).
I believe that essentially all Sandy Bridge motherboards are going to be recalled (correct me if I am wrong please).
Replacements are due by April and I immagine the part but not the labor will be covered for parts.
I immagine that if you bought a laptop or built machine it will be covered parts and labor.
Note two things.
This is not the CPU, but one chip on the motherboard.
Two, this is a precautionary recall as Intel is saying the chip might fail or underperform at some point far into the future.

The last recall from Intel like this I remember was 1994 with an early Pentium floating Processor Unit (FPL).
Credit to Intel to not just make a quiet hardware update and then deal with the failures years from now.

What to do? If you own it, it will get replaced. If not I guess they will stop selling it till April.
Note I say I guess and not Intel announces. But what else can they do.

Too bad as I have seen tests results showing Sandy Bridge transcoding H.264 500% faster than non Sandy Bridge CPU.
That's a lot of performance for CPUs costing the same as the ones they replace.
Note this kind of jump is only for decode, transcoding H.264 video. Other benchmarks range from excellent to great but nothing like the above.
These also are early tests. More / better tests may vary. but it looks like Sandy Bridge, now known as the second generation of I7, I5, I3 will be the
"video CPU".

As always I wish all good luck and thanks to all who make possible and contribute to my favorite site, dvxuser.
 
+1 for avoiding sandy bridge

according to intel, the issue only affects the SATA ports 3 to 6, so it might not even be a problem on a notebook (if only the HDD and the optical drive are connected, SATA ports 1 and 2 should be used anyway, as they are the faster ones)

trouble is: intel is also saying the issue only affects a random 5%-15% of chipsets, and OEMs are finding much higher trouble rates (as read on tomshardware), so I'm not sure you can trust everything intel says right now

I'd go for an i5, and try to get the mercury engine to work on CUDA (any nvdia card with 98 shaders or more and 1GB of memory or more will do), knowing that this may be quite expensive and depending on budget might be left out too...
 
hello everyone and thank you for your posts and information!

phew, i wish i could just come in here and understand at first glance what's written.
i am doing my best but my head is spinning - it's a lot of information about chips and things that is a bit beyond me i'm afraid! i'll have a bash at it and hope no-one minds if my questions are a bit daft!

so - on the value of a good desktop - fortunately at the moment I study and at university I use Adobe Premiere CS4 or FCP on their Macs - it's very fast and easy to use with the 5D footage when I need to do that.
i might keep up my studies on my return from abroad just so i can always use that edit suite :) but yes, at some point i hope to run a business and at that point i can look at the right desktop.
at home right now, as I said - I use CS3 on my old faithful PC.

so - on to the laptop:
Obv if i get any paid work then I can talk to whoever is booking me about using a suite, or whatever
But if not - this laptop'spurpose is to adequately handle my unpaid projects shot on 5D about my travels and a portraiture project I'm doing (to build my portfolio), or low budget stuff - I teach filmmaking to young people and do behind the scenes shoots that go straight to vimeo

so i think, Michael is saying - do consider the Mac - and so - for example the cheapest build Macbook Pro with 13.5in display is £1020 - would that work?

and then, following the sandy bridge fiasco, i'm better off looking for an i3 / i5 / i7 laptop with Nvidia GPU harnessed by CS5 (Mercury), and looking for the laptop with a CPU with maximum number of cores and DDR3 and above from the list on the page that shows you how to unlock those not certified by Adobe.

ok so i'm writing this out as i'm working through the steps of what all these things mean so bear with!

i'm using the guide on the unlocking / hack of NVidia cards to be exploited by CS5 to find relevant PC laptops

here's two I found:

Samsung Q530 = NVidia GeForce 330M = 48 CUDA cores, 4GB DDR3 RAM, Intel Core i3 - 2260 MHz 15.6in 500GB 5400rpm £574
(cheap but would just about manage it - one review says you might have to wait a while but it will process HD :) - and i don't suppose they 'hacked' the GPU...)

Sony VAIO F13 = NVidia GeForce GT 425M = 96 CUDA cores, DDR3, 4GB RAM Intel Core i7 - 1730 MHz 16.4in screen, 500GB HD 5400rpm U]£899[/U]
(not perfect but still reasonably priced)

i think i kinda get it! thanks so much for the info. i'll keep on trucking through and seeing what's out there that fits these specs.

how am i doing?!

Emma Jane :)
 
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* consider saving a bit on the hardware and getting the student version of CS5 production premium, or at least premiere
http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Creativ..._1_1?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1296646689&sr=1-1
(the "elements" version doesn't work with many plugins, e.g. some magic bullet ones, but this student version is just like the full one, except cheaper)

* if you're not going CS5, the samsung Q530 should be fine (and it's kind-of-future-proof, as in "it supports CUDA, though with only 48 shaders)

* if you're going CS5 on a budget, this looks like a great deal (i3-380M, 4GB, nvidia 540M with 96 shaders and 1GB, w7-64)
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...02_079_Aspire_AS5742G_6846_15_6_Notebook.html

the thing I like least about those is screen resolution: 1366x768 should die, asap

* if your budged allows for CS5 and a not-so-cheap PC (but still cheaper than a macbook pro), and you want power and a 1920x1080 screen and don't mind the laptop being bulky and heavy and with a smallish battery life, you can consider things like this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...94US_GT660R_494US_15_6_Notebook_Computer.html
or even this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/734124-REG/ASUS_G73JW_A1_G73Jw_A1_17_3_Notebook_Computer.html

I understand it is kind of flexible, but everything would be a bit easier if you defined your budget a bit better...
 
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