Loading up laptop for P2

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BillWojo

Active member
I picked up a used laptop off of Ebay. It's a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with Core2 DUO 2.4G, 2GB ram and a 300GB HDD. I want to load drivers for uploading and viewing P2 cards. I also am loading Vegas 12 Pro. I suspect I will need more ram as it only has 2GB. I can either go with 4 or 8 GB of ram. I know this is not going to be fast by todays standards but I just want it to work reliably.
Having read all I can about setting up for the PC card slot I know I have to load drivers from Panasonic and it looks like I have to load QuickTime as well. There are different versions of P2 viewer, it's a bit confusing. So what do you recommend? I have Windows 7 64Bit installed.
This unit has firewire, a type 2 PC slot and 3 USB ports so it has lots of connectivity. Not going to be a hot rod for sure but I think I will have a nice portable storage and editing machine for field use.
Thank You
Bill Wojo
 
Ok, so I got home today and the laptop was sitting on my porch! First thing I did was to load Vegas 12 Pro and DVD Architect Pro 6. Could not find the correct site to download Titler Pro 1 from, all I could find is Ver 2, not free. I'll look for that later.
I than loaded Quick Time, the P2 driver, Ver 2.22 and P2 Viewer.
Took the P2 card out of my HVX and slid it into the laptop. The laptop let me off load the clips and I could watch them in the viewer. I than imported the clips into Vegas and I could view them in there.
All in all, off to a good start. So much nicer than using tapes. Now I get it.
Love this forum, so much info here that sometimes I just need to kick back and reread threads to find exactly the info I'm looking for. Thanks to everyone that contributes. I'd be lost without it.
Bill Wojo
 
A cheap old laptop with pcmcia slots is an excellent solution for p2. It is such a bulletproof and hassle free technology. I bought a Dell D430 six months ago for the same reason and I keep mine lean and mean. I haven't installed any software so I have the maximum hdd available for offloading p2 cards. Effectively it's like having an extra 2 cards at a fraction of the price. p2 offloads quick so by the time you've filled the second card the first is back in the camera. The Dell itself is only a couple of lbs and tiny so I treat it as purely a p2 reader with a built in screen for review. At $80 it was a steal and not much more than the shipping would be of the price of a dedicated p2 reader all the while retaining more functionality.

How does the thinkpad cope with Vegas and the other software? I would have thought it is a little long in the tooth to do any editing. Upgrading the ram would make a difference but whether that difference is worth it... Not sure about the Lenovo but the Dell RAM was disproportionately overvalued on ebay compared to the laptop. When I bought it the D430 was going for $120-150 on average yet the same sellers asking $60 for a 1MB ram upgrade! Luckily I held out and got a fully specced one at a good price from a private seller. Battery's starting to go now but I've got a 12V plug for the car if it comes to it.
 
Wow, 60 bucks for 1 GB of ram? I can get 8GB for about 90 bucks. I really don't know Vegas yet but tonight or this weekend I'm going to take about an hour of footage that I shot on my DVX and load it by firewire. I'll just render it and burn to a DVD. That will give me an idea of how this thing runs. I only paid 132 for the laptop and so far it's doing good. Like you I'm keeping it very lean and mean. I have a desktop PC for cruising the net that gets bloated with crap and bogs down. I have only gone to the sites I need to download drivers and such. I'll let you know.
Bill Wojo
 
I bought an old Dell 6400 with 4gb ram. First thing I did was change out to an SSD HD. Way faster. I don't edit on it, just use to capture live from my camera (so I don't have to use tape). I am planning to use it to dump p2 cards in a shoot coming up. (need to get that working before next weekend)
 
Right now I'm rendering a full 63 minute long DV tape shot from my DVX100B (Christmas footage taken at my dads). All I did was capture and render to Mpeg2 so I can burn it to a DVD. Looks like 63 minutes of tape is going to take 52 minutes to render. It's actually faster than my desk top computer that I use for the web. Need to clean this out and reload or better yet get a newer computer. Last time I rendered this way on this computer it took 30 minutes to render a 10 minute clip. I had no idea that it would be this fast. Very satisfied so far.
 
Wow. If it renders in 52 minutes I'll be impressed. That said the laptop is more contemporary to the DVX100. It will be interesting to compare how it handles HD footage off p2. Of course if you're using p2 for SD then the only difference should be improved workflow. I use an HVX and didn't get a p2 card straight away so had to play around with tape for a couple of months while I saved up. Haven't used tape since. No messing around. Step 1, drag the files in. Step 2, edit!
 
Cryogenic Filmworks said:
I bought an old Dell 6400 with 4gb ram. First thing I did was change out to an SSD HD. Way faster. I don't edit on it, just use to capture live from my camera (so I don't have to use tape). I am planning to use it to dump p2 cards in a shoot coming up. (need to get that working before next weekend)
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My understanding is that SSD is very fast at handling small files that are frequently loaded in and out like in an operating system. But large files, particularly data are not optimal for the technology and significantly slower than a disk based HDD which are faster at sustained throughput and large file sizes. So operating systems and software like certain games that primarily consist of a collection of small library files will be faster but loading or transferring large data files like video will bottleneck.

As far as using the p2 cards, if you have a pcmcia slot then all you need is the p2 card viewer software from panasonic. I'm not sure you even need that to just drag and drop the files but it is handy for previewing files and provides a right click menu option to quickly reformat the p2 card.
 
It took 52 minutes and 40 seconds. The processor in here is no more than 4 years old. Seems to work fine.
 
Would hard drive speed matter if recording direct to hard drive from a P2 Camera? SSD vs Regular 7200 Drive.
 
Haha, it is contemporary to hvx (tail end anyway), not dvx. Just feels like pcmcia is that long old! I'm still impressed though.
 
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Yea, I'm impressed to. Especially since I only paid 132.50 for it on Ebay. I didn't think anything as new as that would have a PCMCIA card in it either. When I get some extra cash I'm going to upgrade the ram to 8 GB. It's easy to throw money at one of these and upgrade the processor, add a SSD hard drive and even second drive if you loose the DVD drive but at that point all that money could buy a newer generation laptop. I'm just going to spend some time and try and learn the Vegas software. Even the most basic stuff is taking me a lot of time to figure out.
Bill Wojo
 
It will be interesting to see how it holds up with a more complicated edit and/or rendering HD footage off the p2. If you can get it up to 8GB ram it might not be such a crazy proposition. Does it have the Core2Duo 2.8GHz processor?


rzxrey said:
Would hard drive speed matter if recording direct to hard drive from a P2 Camera? SSD vs Regular 7200 Drive.
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No, it will be fine since it is recording in real-time. The question of SSD vs HDD transfer speeds is only an issue for moving and copying files which is a much much faster process on either technology than streaming in real-time (can you imagine if a storage device took 90 minutes to copy a 90 minute media file?). For the same reason, the difference in the time to load and playback a media file will be negligible but when copying an entire directory of media files from one drive to another the HDD will be noticeably faster. Even then both are fast, SSD is just faster with small files and HDD faster with big files. Which isn't to say a poorly designed system won't have bottlenecks that will produce a different result.
 
Is there a limit on the maximum disk capacity that can be installed for the dell E6400? I think it will be a great for long steady shoots using OnLocation for capture.
 
The processor is a 2.4Ghz Core2Duo. I'm just amazed that you can find such crazy deals on laptops like this. The Thinkpads are very well built, very rugged. I think this was one of the last versions to still include the PCMCIA port. When I started looking for a way to off load the P2 cards I read all I could on this forum. Since I'm into motorsports the ability to off load in the field was important to me. So I started looking for the newest laptop that had a PCMCIA slot. I know about the adapter cards but I didn't want something hanging out the side that could get damaged.
I help run a speedway motorcycle team and things can get very hectic at times. If our rider crashes, the hell with video, tools are flying and the most important thing at that time is getting the bike ready for the next round. I needed something rugged that might get knocked around. I try and keep my equipment safe but others are not so concerned when there is work to be done. I video a lot of the races but when our rider is due to be up, I grab the camera and tripod setup and hustle back to the pits and just set it next to our pit. After his machine is running I grab my setup and hustle back to the fence and setup again.
Last season I was taping with a Sony DCR-TRV900 on a cheap tripod. This season I'm stepping it up a quite a bit. I've got a DVX100B and an old O'Connor 35A tripod with a rebuilt model 30 head that I changed the counterbalance springs out to better fit a light weight camera. Also picked up a Peter Lisand baby tripod to get some interesting shots at about axle height.
I recently picked up a broken HVX200P that I hope to repair. It came with a 8GB card. That's why I wanted the laptop. If I could record in 720/60 it would make for some nice HD slow motion.
Sorry for the long winded post.
Bill Wojo
 
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rzxrey said:
Is there a limit on the maximum disk capacity that can be installed for the dell E6400? I think it will be a great for long steady shoots using OnLocation for capture.
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A quick search for a review state the the largest drives that came with the e6400 were 250GB 7,200rpm HDD or 128GB SSD. I'd go HDD for capacity. It takes a 2.5" HDD so 250GB may not be the limit but it is plenty. In 720p/24pN I get 40 minutes on a 16GB p2 card. That said it will probably be cheaper to buy a 2nd hand laptop with the specs you want than upgrade one you've already got. In the second hand marketing model the prices are cheap for the laptop then they sting you for the parts they didn't sell when it was current!
 
BillWojo said:
So I started looking for the newest laptop that had a PCMCIA slot. I know about the adapter cards but I didn't want something hanging out the side that could get damaged.
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Agreed, my thinking as well. With two p2 cards and a laptop to offload to you can record pretty much continuously since the card takes less time to offload than fill.

BillWojo said:
I help run a speedway motorcycle team and things can get very hectic at times. If our rider crashes, the hell with video, tools are flying and the most important thing at that time is getting the bike ready for the next round.
Click to expand...

Seems you lack the pathological requirements of a funniest home video entrant :)

BillWojo said:
I recently picked up a broken HVX200P that I hope to repair. It came with a 8GB card. That's why I wanted the laptop. If I could record in 720/60 it would make for some nice HD slow motion.
Click to expand...

Ah, I was wondering why you kept mentioning DVX and p2 in the same breath. The native under/over cranking was a big selling point for me too. While the same result can be achieved relatively easily in other cameras there is no post conversion to be done with the HVX. And using 24pN the native 24fps timeline uses as 24fps timeline whereas other cameras waste memory embedding it in a 30p or worse 60i timeline. Hope you get it fixed. It's a little long in the tooth but a magnitude better than the DVX. And the p2 workflow is a joy.
 
I use an old mac powerbook titanium to off load to a firewire 400 drive, it will still edit SD too so is ideal as a quick news cutting laptop in the field.

if I have my full edit system it can also act as a card reader via ethernet to the main mac pro.
 
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