Hi guys, looking for some help picking a laptop.

Budget is £500, i found one that I liked the look of (core i3, 4 gig ram, 500gig HD) but it didn;t have a forewire port :(

It wont be my main editing machine, got a desktop for that, so it'l be for SDE (same day edits for weddings) and on location editin, so I'm not looking for miracles, just something decent, with a firewire port :)

From what I've read, I'd be looking for a core i processor (is a core i3 better than a core2 duo/quad?)

I'll be editing HDV and canon 7d footage (transcoded to cineform or other),

15" screen is big enough (don't want to be lugging around a 17")

Prob need at least 320gb Hard drive, at least 3 gig RAM?

Any help or suggestions much appreciated.

James

Others may disagree, but I don't think laptops are very good for video editing, and certainly not HD editing. Here's my reasoning:

Ideally, for video editing you need: lots of screen real estate; lots of hard disk capacity; a very fast procesor and depending on the NLE, a fast grphics card. This is tough to achieve with a laptop. You'll be uncomfotable and miserable in a short time. Plus, renders may take forever and overheating is always a concern with laptops.

Get a cheap laptop to handle all your needs except editing. Then, start building an i7-920 based desktop. All together, you'll spend about $1500 but you'll be much happier.

I agree with Paul. This is not only because of the performance and heat issues, but also due to the fact that you need at least a 17" or 19" screen just to get a processor that's even suitable for HDV editing. The laptops with 15" screens tend to have CPUs and graphics components which are barely passable for even SD (480i), let alone 1080i HDV, video editing. Plus, the 15" screens themselves are barely passable for even the display of 720p content since they are physically incapable of reproducing more than 720 lines.

hi guys, thanks for the replies.

I know a desktop is better, my main editing is done on a desktop with a 23" screen.

I'm in the market for a laptop in general, so why not get one that can - at a push - do some editing in short bursts?

Basically, I've got £500 to spend on a laptop, I don't need another desktop, I need a laptop for portabilty.

Thanks for the replies

James

I see. Well then, an external drive can always be plugged in.

The big problem here is the market reality. Those inexpensive laptops can't do HDV editing at all (or more specifically, they would take an astronomically long time to render a very minute amount of such content - several hours of rendering for each minute of video recorded, which means that the battery will completely run flat before you come anywhere close to finishing the job). In other words, you will need available hard-wired AC line power just to do any HD editing at all.

so how would this laptop cope with editing?

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say, compared to my core2duo 2.6, 3 gig ram desktop?

This seems like a good deal no?

James

About as well as the desktop you replaced with your latest one. :)
Okay for a laptop, but really not very well. Video editing is the most demanding task for PCs.

Configured properly for HDV, the price is now GBP1879.00, or $2,874.13 USD. Should work fine.

EDIT: No, sorry, my mistake, forgot the long life batt and backlit keyboard, both of which you will need if you are editing on location in proper lighting for editing. Price now GBP1969.01, or $3,011.30 USD.

The only thing close to some mediocre degree of comfortable editing is around $ 5K, but even then it is still way slower than a desktop and still requires a wall outlet. If you want something comparable to a desktop, but still luggable, you are talking $ 9 K plus.

For your budget requirements, forget a laptop for editing. Desktops are way cheaper and then a budget system starts at $ 1,200 without the case, PSU, monitor, keyboard, mouse, DVD/BR burner etc. For your budget it is utterly UNREALISTIC to expect anything from a laptop. You can as well get a bag of coffee beans for less. It won't make a difference for editing.

so how would this laptop cope with editing?

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say, compared to my core2duo 2.6, 3 gig ram desktop?

This seems like a good deal no?

James

As the other replies have stated, the configurations are barely adequate for even standard-definition video editing. The processors are strong enough, but everything else is weak compared to a full-sized system. At this price class you'd only get a 2.5" 5400 RPM hard drive which has a much slower sequential transfer rate than even a "green" 5400 RPM desktop hard drive. Plus you'd get a graphics chip whose performance is roughly at the same level as a Radeon X800 or X1600/X1650 desktop GPU - hardly what I'd call suitable for HDV editing.

I'm a PC, but I was wondering if Apple's laptops are similar in terms of editing performance.

Without wishing to start any platform war you can edit (well) with a "near top end" 15 inch or 17 inch Apple MBP - but best with an attached external hard drive and indeed this is what I did for the first year of my corporate video business (Mid 2008, 15 inch Matt Screen, Core Duo 2.5Ghz, 200GB 7200rpm HDD, 4GB RAM with FW800 or Express Slot 34 attached G-RAID3, 2 TB 7,200rpm in RAID 0). People like Philip Bloom do editing on gear similar to this all the time on the road.

But if you price all that out it's close to the sum mentioned above (i.e. 1800-2000 quid area) - but then you've got to buy FCS etc etc. so consider this a MINIMUM. Forget the lesser 13 inch MBPs etc., the're just "marketed junk" (IMO) and lack the true graphics capability you'll need. They really cheapen the "pro" brand.

So I think the take home message is that if you want a portable editing solution then this is the sort of figure you need to be considering if you want reasonable performance - sure cutting corners will save some money but will also add to (the already considerable) rendering times you may have to tolerate. SDE implies you can't wait for hours and hours!

I just bought my dad a Sony VIAO FW56 with Win 7 for about 850 quid which was close to (but not really at) the spec you'd need on a Windows laptop and even with that it would end up being well over a Grand for something passingly capable of (HD) video editing with something like Vegas (the only other NLE that I know and use). 500 quid is just not enough I'm afraid.

James, if your clients really want SDE then make sure they pay you well for it as you're going to need some serious hardware!!!

I thought it might be a pipe dream, ah well.

I havent started to offer SDEs, I just thought while I was getting a new laoptop for general laptop stuff, I might as well get one that I could edit on as well. Silly me for thinking I could do it on a budget £500.

The reason the budget is £500 is I sold off 2 older desktop systems that have been sitting in a cupboard for the past year, made about £300, thought I could add £200 and get an editing laptop. Looks like I was niave (naieve?) however you spell it.

Will prob just get a netbook then and stick to editing on the desktops.


so....

Anyone got any reccomendations for netbooks? :) :) :)

I've edited an entire HDV movie on Prem Pro and then exported it to AE for heavy compositing and color correction. I also used a laptop to render a one minute 3D Animation. The 3D animation took 14 days to render and the entire movie took 7 days to render to a 24bit TIFF sequence master from AE.

The laptop I used was an Acer Aspire 8920 - Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, external HDD on firewire.

The entire project was worked on the native HDV stream - no encoding or rendering in the middle.

I think a lot of this is not as black and white as it might seem.... Lots of shades of gray exist.

I've got an older (3+ years I think) dell M90 that I bought to be downstream from an SI 2K mini. It's got 2 GB of RAM, T7400 processor, and an NVIDIA QuadroFX 2500M display card. It's only 32 bit of course so I still run XP on it.

While far from ideal, I have edited some shorter pieces shot on my EX1 in native XDcam mode in PPro CS4 (which is a RAM consuming monster as Adobe users know). Is my desktop better? Oh yeah... Is this 'laptop' too large to open on a plane and too hot to set on your legs? Yup. Can I take my desktop on an air travel location and use it to edit in my hotel room? Hardly.

Also...for the Mac question...I had a brand new 17" MacBook Pro that I was using in mid-2008 and I didn't see any real differences between the two platforms for editing capability. The Mac has a nicer interface for the OS, and the styling of a Mac laptop is just head and shoulders above any utilitarian PC laptop and all that, but as far as getting work done, they were both decent performers for a portable machine. The PC probably had the edge in display card torque for AE previews...but again, in a general sense I didn't sense that either was head and shoulders better than the other.

I can't remember the exact price of that Dell M90 machine, but it seems to me it was just a bit under 3500.00 USD.

I think that if you plan on trying to use a really small laptop to edit video, I'd try to learn Vegas. I've run Vegas on a little email laptop that can't get out of its own way and it works...it's not fast, but it's hard to crash as it seems to scale its performance to different configurations better than any NLE software I've ever encountered.

All that said, keep in mind that HDV and XDcam are heavily compressed, long GOP formats and they are processor intensive. The data rate of the video allows you to use pretty pedestrian little harddrives (I use these shirt-pocket sized Seagates that have the little self-powering USB cable for portable work), but you have to have some serious processor power to handle the decompress/recompress tasks during editing.

I think they'll be a day when a really proficient HD-capable editing laptop will be out there for 1000.00 USD, but it's not today unfortunately...

Tim,

One thing to add to your post:

HDV and XDCAM are two formats that are relatively easy to edit, in contrast to AVCHD. Where a notebook may give reasonable/acceptable performance with HDV or XDCAM, it will hopelessly fail with AVCHD material.

Given that so many are lured by the resolution and attractive prices of AVCHD cameras, few realize that it really requires a beast of a machine to edit. Of course this is caused by the salespeople, who fail to mention that you really need a new computer to edit that material.

Ah yes, AVCHD.

I have not used it yet myself and I need to work that into my consciousness when having a conversation about such things...

Harm is of course, correct. Those of us who thought MPEG2 based HDV/XDcam was a pain in the processor to handle had not yet seen MPEG4 based AVCHD. I'm quite certain that the laptop I have would be grossly inadequate to handle the codec operations associated with editing AVCHD, even though it does seem to be able to chug through XDcam acceptably when I need it to...

so how would this laptop cope with editing?

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I have a Dell Studio 15 with a 15.6" 1080p display I bought from their Outlet for $500. It's an excellent location backup/playback device, works well with Canon EOS Utility software, and lets me use ZoomBrowser EX for basic editing without transcoding.

I also use it to show clients examples of my work to land a paid shoot and to show them results during.