Laptop for CS5?
 

I'm looking for a PC laptop good enough to use for transferring files on-set when shooting with a Red One (and soon the Epic).The specs for that are discussed here What it amounts to is having two firewire 800 ports or USB 3, or an express card slot to allow for the expansion.

There's only one Mac that meets this spec, and it's the 17", which is a bit big for lugging around on a set. I'd rather have a 15" laptop. Fact is, I'm currently a PC user, so I'd rather stick with what I know.

I also want to be able to run Premiere and AE CS5. Adobe specs here system requirements CS5 A VGA port would be good to to get dual monitor.

Any suggestions?

I would recommend the 17" Macbook Pro.
It's not so big. It's slim, it's light, it's quiet, it has the express card slot, one FW800, and you can run Windows on it! Just like I do.

Eric Bowen of ADK Video Editing built a killer laptop to run Premiere for me just a few weeks ago. Since I bought it before CS5 was announced, it's running CS4. ADK is a beta tester for Premiere (and others) so they knew CS5 while they were building the laptop for me.

Some things to know. First, it takes power to do NLE (my laptop is using the new Core i7) so it's going to be a relatively expensive laptop. And, big laptops are heavy. And since their power requirements are fairly high, you get limited time on battery alone, and the charger is big and heavy too.

What you get for the size and weight tradeoff is a kick-ass editing machine. For me this was a good thing, but I've got to do this stuff on the road a fair amount; my choices are somewhat limited. Just sayin'.

I was at the Adobe Tour here in Sweden today and they told me there are some new laptops coming with support for cuda. I can't remeber them all but one was a new HP.

Regards
Mikael

I thought HP would have one. I just hope it's not too expensive.

I think I've jumped the gun a bit here and really have to wait till more info is available about CS5.

The most powerful laptops I have found, is Sager.
I bought one for video editing (Premiere CS3) 2 years ago and I am very happy.
Their laptops are of course more powerful today, but I haven't checked if they have all the connections you mention. Might be worth checking out.
(I bought mine from Xotic pc: www.xoticpc.com

Karel,

Like Trond said, Sager is about the only one to supply good notebooks, but your hopes for reasonable priced are not fullfilled. I recently configured a Sager (but did not buy it) and it came out at $ 5,200 and some.

True, Sager is expencive.
But the advantage is that it uses desktop CPU which are faster than the regular laptop CPUs available.
Mine is the 17" Sager NP9262, and I believe it came with a price tag of around 4000 USD when I bought it.
That was top specifications back then.

Check the Asus G51Jx-A1. It's an i7 notebook with 6GB of ram for ~1500$. It does well with Pr and can be configured for 16GB of ram and faster CPUs. Or if you can wait for the new Fermi equipped notebooks.