I use a Sony F-350 XDCamHD for sportsnews, and I would like to cut the stories on a lap-top and bounce them back to disk on the camera. I would then feed using the camera for playback.

I'm a Mac guy and I know very little about the PC world, but I've been wondering if Vegas might do the trick.

Can anybody point me towards good valued PC laptops(firewire) capable of doing basic editing. I'd like to keep it down to just a lap-top and camera combo, no extra pieces, if possible.

I'm not sure that going cheap is necessarily the right thing to do, but I'd like to compare pricing against a MacBook Pro/FCP combo(which is overkill for what I need at the moment).

Any other solutions would be appreciated as well.

Thanks,

Peter

My favorite laptop for windows, is my MacBook. It runs windows and vegas great with bootcamp using XP. You can certainly buy a cheaper laptop, Dell has them for $600 or so but I've never had good luck with cheap laptops.

Duane

The Vaio line from Sony is specifically geared toward multimedia and Vegas should be the ideal software not only because it's a lean editor but also because it comes from the same company, so they should play nicely with each other.

"cheapest"...

Proxy editing in realtime is always possible , even with older notebooks.

I´ve installed Vegas 7 on a Celeron Notebook:
Proxy Editing is fine - but when it comes to render with the full res files things get waaaayyyyy sssssloooooowwww...

I´d recommend to buy a dual core 2000$ PC-Laptop and use Vegas with it.

Render speeds should be fine with that.

ULi

Why not a Macbook (not Pro)?

For $1000 you could get the job done.

[edit: With a Macbook, you could also just run the PC XDCAM software, edit proxies in that, and transfer cut lists back to the cam for playback. Now THAT would be fast and easy, assuming you could deal with the edit limitations]

Why not a Macbook (not Pro)?

For $1000 you could get the job done.

Totally agree with Nate. Peter, if you're already on the Mac platform, a new Mac laptop would give you the ability to use Windows or OSX. But from the task you're describing, FCP would work fine. Bring in your clips for the package, trim, do VO if necessary, export sequence back to disc. At that point, make a clip list that contains only one clip... your single clip you mastered back to the disc. Put camera in subclip mode and feed. Done. Thank you very much. And you're outta there, headed home to relax. (grin)

-gb-

EDIT: Hey Peter, just saw this listing in our classifieds. Might be perfect for you. See: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost.php?p=749209&postcount=1