laptops for Same Day Edit production
 

I've been producing Wedding Video for almost a year now and really love what I'm doing. Basically 3 cam ceremony and 2 cam reception shoots with a photo montage chapter. Just adding photo montage video presentation at the ceremony.

Looking a little ahead, I would like to tackle Same Day Edits for the reception presentation. So I'm looking for best practice suggestions for a solid laptop. I would like to continue to use Premiere Pro 1.5 for NLE. Any procedure advice for this short turn-around would be much appreciated as well.

One last quiz... Anyone offering highlight miniCDs to the bride yet?

Thanks in advance!

Premiere Pro is a heavy resource user so you will need a very
hefty laptop for that. In my opinion Sony Vegas requires much
less hardware and is a great system in combination with Excalibur
a dream to do multi-cam editing.

If you want a solid laptop I would go with the big name brands
and get good warranty. I have a DELL Inspiron 9100 which is
what they call a desktop-replacement-laptop (it's large) but packs
tremendous power (but expensive!).

Do a search on laptop here, there have been lots of threads to
suggest laptops etc.

Myself and Mark Von Lanken chose the same laptop. The Toshiba Satelite series. It has a 17" widescreen, 512mgs of ram, and a 3.0-3.2 ghz Pentium 4. Not bad for under $1700.

I purchased it because I needed a laptop that was powerfull enough to do editing on the road away from home, and subsequently away from my desktop. It fits the bill quite nicely. The one thing I'd definitly consider adding would be a nice external HD. I use the Maxtor 300gig external that uses the Diamondmax Plus 10 which boasts 7200 rpm and a whopping 16mg cache. I can't tell the difference in speed compared to my internal SATA drives in my desktop.

I opted for a Sager. 3.4GHz, 1 Gig RAM, 17" Widescreen, has a numeric keypad, and TWO 60Gig 7200RPM drives. I've edited some two hour 3-cam events on it so far without the need for an external drive (and, yes, Rob - running Vegas and Excalibur).

Thanks for the replies... I'm not familiar with Sager laptops but will check them out. I'm using PPro 1.5 in the office and had planned on putting it on the laptop as well, but you guys are really getting my interest in Vegas.

My plan for now is pre-edit the photo montage and place it on a timeline on the laptop with some extra preset transitions ready to add to fresh wedding scenes. Then complete the SDE and play back directly to the projector. Any suggestions to this plan?

I still have not come up with a good solution for dealing with the audio... How about self-powered speakers?

Maybe wire it through the DJ's board. You have to contact the DJ way ahead of time to make sure he capable of that....and even then it's better to bring/rent your own equipment.

There's a videographer around me that offers a service where he'll send out a crew to set up the projection and sound without you having to worry about a thing. However the service is quite pricey.

<<<-- Originally posted by Skip Goodrum : My plan for now is pre-edit the photo montage and place it on a timeline on the laptop with some extra preset transitions ready to add to fresh wedding scenes. Then complete the SDE and play back directly to the projector. Any suggestions to this plan? -->>>

Not only pre-edit the non-added stuff, also PRE-RENDER those sections as well. You don't want to waste time rendering a photo montage that could have been rendered days before. Then put the rendered video back on the timeline in place of the images allowing the proper holes for the SDE sections.