High end laptop or low end laptop and average-high end desktop
 

This year I'll be shooting and editing on location HD video and outputting to 640x360 rez 3-4 minute highlight videos for the web. At the end of the year I'll be producing an hour long HD documentary of the season's racing.

Now my dilemma is:

Do I get a High end laptop with i7 and a decent graphics card for around £2000 to deal with everything (will it deal with it all comfortably?!)

OR

Do I get a low end laptop for around £600 to deal with the on location editing with a non dedicated graphics card and low end processor (what could I comfortably get away with for the on location editing?) AND a good desktop for the end of year shananigans?

I havn't got a lot of experience and could do with some advice here as it's a big buy for me and I don't want to screw it up!

Cheers

A laptop is around 4-5 times slower than a desktop, sometimes even more. A laptop is great for capturing with On Location, but with the advent of tapeless cameras, that advantage is rapidly disappearing. If you have a tapeless workflow, there is no sense in spending a lot of money on an expensive and still underpowered laptop, when you can easily transfer your data to even a USB external with a low cost laptop and enjoy the benefits of a good desktop/workstation, which will be faster in all aspects.

But will I still be able to edit the shorter videos for the online videos on location on a sub standard laptop (what can I get away with basically)? It's no good just being able to transfer the video onto the laptop and then not be able to edit it into the web videos on location.

I suppose realistically I should be looking at the second option, but what can I get away with on the laptop side of things for cheap?

Toshiba has just released their 2010 line of laptops in Aus... I've gotta say I'm blown away completely. A 2.4ghz Core i5, 16" screen, 4gb ram and 1gb dedicated graphics for AUD$1400, which is about 800 pounds. They also have a 2.26ghz core i3 (I'd never heard of them until yesterday... anybody know anything about them?), 4gb ram, 1gb graphics for the same price. Also HP and Toshiba have both just released 17" 2.66 ghz Core i7's for about AUD$1900. I don't think I'll ever go back to a desktop again after seeing what they are are packing into laptops these days at incedible prices.

All the benchmark results I have seen show that laptops, including my own (which was not intended for video editing, is half a year old and packs nothing more than mediocre performance, Sony Vaio VGN-FW31ZJ) are up to around ten times slower than my desktop/workstation. The best laptop results I have seen are nearly 6 times slower. I use my laptop only for office work and occasional off-loading of EX material or On-Location.

Admitted, the gap may be closing in terms of CPU's, but the real difference is in disk setup. Now if you get a decent $ 2K laptop and add an eSATA external raid5 with 4 or more disks the difference will be even smaller, but luggability and external juice defeat the purpose of the laptop.

If you are considering editing AVCHD, do not consider anything less than an i7 at high clock speed.

BTW, Toshiba is not a brand known for it's reliability, nor is HP (at least in the past year).

I think this question can't be answered without knowing which camera/code/NLE and if you plan to use an intermediary codec like DNx.

Generally speaking, it sure is nice having two computers.

I'll be using a Sony EX1 and editing on Premiere Pro.

Really I just need to know what I can get away with on a cheaper laptop as I'll be doing the big project on the desktop.

The extended warranty company commonly seen on ebay, SquareTrade, recently released their info on over 30,000 laptops that were covered under their warranty. The best were Asus, Sony, Dell and Apple with all having 16-18% failure rate within the 1st year and HP & Lenovo were at the end with almost 25%. HOWEVER, SquareTrade stated that there is a relation between cost and reliability - the higher priced laptops were more reliable. Consider that most laptops bought are $600-900 US - Dell is making some seriously reliable laptops because most of their non-enterprise customers buy inexpensive laptops.

Probably the most important aspect to focus on is data redundancy for field recording/editing. Most good laptops come with an eSata port so I would get at least a 2-drive Raid 1 external box.

With only a single 3-4 minute clip to render, an Intel Pentium dual-core will suffice. But definitely get at least 4GB of ram and Win 7 64bit.