Looking for a laptop to do rough edits on when out and about, and then burn to DVD. I use premier pro 1.5 and will be using premier to burn the DVDs as I don't need the complication of encore when I'm out in the field, though I use that when I'm back in the syudio. Anyone have any experience of whats available out there to buy at the moment, or suggested minimum specs
dv or hdv ?
you will need a fairly powerful laptop and better to stick to pure cuts.
you really need a second hard-drive , so that narrows down the market ( unless you use an external second drive )
Will you really have time to burn rough edits in the field?
1 hour camera tape will take 1 hour to load.
x mins to edit
45 to 90 mins to burn edited version
Will party requiring DVD wait around for 3 hours?
Gary's suggestion of 2nd hard drive would have advantage you could easily switch it from laptp to main edit suite use. AFIK external drives require power, so may restrict where you load footage onto laptop.
Loading camera footage to external hard drive will require 2 firewire sockets (assuming HD is firewire)- although camera could possibly be connected to external HD firewire socket (so only 1 firewire socket needed on laptop).
I have had problems capturing from camera to external HD (2 uses of firewire at same time) on my main edit suite - but if I recall correctly Alan Roberts uses this process with no problems - and on a laptop.
It would be SD.
Edit would only be 5-15 mins total length made up of highlights from the day/days. Sometimes I'd have the in between night(s) to work on the preceding days which would create more time. I took my main edit PC to an event last year and put together what I needed in about 50 mins including encoding and burning.
Does premier take advantage of Dual core processors to make them worth while or am I better off with a single chip at a higher speed, as mobile dual cores seem to have relatively slow clock speeds at the moment.
i can only offer my use of multiprocessors as an example
i have one pc with 2 x xeon processors @ 2.2Ghz hyperthreading
i have one pc with a dual core @ 2.8ghz
the 2.8Ghz dual core outperforms the dual xeon at converting mpeg/avi to xvid ........
How about one of these
My desktops a P4 2.86 with 512 so the above laptop could well work out faster. I don'y have any trouble with live preview and editing on the desktop and drive wise I know 'everyone' recommends firewire for externals but if you've got genuine USB2 ports not ones that are linked to the motherboard using USB on the inside and use 7200rpm HDs they are more than up to running video for editing
Check out the HP Pavillion series & my posts in general, it`s a really hi specced machine & I have no problem editing or burning using LE + a Maxtor One Touch 200gig drive.
Also consider a "QuickStream DV" camera HD for fast input into the laptop!