There is no question that the world of small notebook computers has gotten quite a lot larger in the past 6 months. Asus, MSI -- even Dell is getting into the game.
With so many cheap, lightweight, small notebooks with very long battery life *and* very short boot-up times, there'd seem to be the opportunity to finally have a good way to easily offload hours of P2 footage in the field while taking only 2 cards per camera and never having to stop.
The main drawback so far is that, as best I can tell, none seem to have ExpressCard or PCMCIA slots. Is this a deal-breaker? Alternatively, are there ways to get around this without occupying the camera for offloading directly?
Using old, junky laptops keeps running into a few key problems: the batteries are old, too; the laptop's big, bulky and potentially unreliable; as a full-feature PC, its boot-up time is long relative to what you want to do with it (just copy some data as quickly as possible to a (potentially external) hard drive).
As someone with only two P2 cards, the main thing keeping me from repeatedly sending people out in the field for longer shoots is the lack of battery power and the long boot-up times on the laptops we can afford to send out for this purpose.
I don't need people editing in the field, watching footage in the field, or copying data much faster than it takes to fill up the second 16gb card (though, of course, the faster the turnaround, the better off we'll be).
Who out there is streamlining this approach -- either with mini-notes, or stripped-down old laptops (and powering them cheaply)?
With so many cheap, lightweight, small notebooks with very long battery life *and* very short boot-up times, there'd seem to be the opportunity to finally have a good way to easily offload hours of P2 footage in the field while taking only 2 cards per camera and never having to stop.
The main drawback so far is that, as best I can tell, none seem to have ExpressCard or PCMCIA slots. Is this a deal-breaker? Alternatively, are there ways to get around this without occupying the camera for offloading directly?
Using old, junky laptops keeps running into a few key problems: the batteries are old, too; the laptop's big, bulky and potentially unreliable; as a full-feature PC, its boot-up time is long relative to what you want to do with it (just copy some data as quickly as possible to a (potentially external) hard drive).
As someone with only two P2 cards, the main thing keeping me from repeatedly sending people out in the field for longer shoots is the lack of battery power and the long boot-up times on the laptops we can afford to send out for this purpose.
I don't need people editing in the field, watching footage in the field, or copying data much faster than it takes to fill up the second 16gb card (though, of course, the faster the turnaround, the better off we'll be).
Who out there is streamlining this approach -- either with mini-notes, or stripped-down old laptops (and powering them cheaply)?
