Laptops and editing? 4200rpm drives
 

Can a fast laptop with a 4200rpm drive capture dv video??


Is it fast enuff...?
Does it choke?
Drop frames?


Please advise...


thanks

7200rpm is recommended for DV capture. Your best bet would be to get a 7200rpm drive and put it in an external enclosure to hook up to your laptop. (USB2/Firewire)

There are people who claim to not have drop frame problems with 5400rpm drives.

I woudn't even try with a 4200rpm drive, however there is another post in these forums right now stating that DV Rack claims the ability to have perfect captures only utilizing a 4200rpm drive. You might want to look into this.

Your going to have even more trouble because your capturing to the same system drive that your OS/NLE software is running on. If you insist on giving it a shot, clear everything off of it possible and make sure it is very well defragmented and let us know how it turns out.

Yep, no problem, I've got an emachines AMD 64 with 512MB Ram and a 60GB 4200 RPM drive. It does fine with no dropped frames on capture.
Although it does editing with no issues it is a little slow to boot and open applications. I'm waiting for Seagates 100 GB 7200 RPM drive to hit the shelves before I upgrade the drive.

I've done it on a Powerbook with a 4200RPM drive without problems, you do need to make sure that you have plenty of room AND that the drive is clean and defragged though. Many of the external disk recording units used 4200RPM drives, of course they weren't running the OS as well but it should have plenty of room in the bandwidth. NOW, editing on that drive can get a little slower when you start stacking layers but for simple captures and editing, it should be alright. The 5400 is better, and a 7200 is even better still, but they suck more battery power too.

I've been using my Gateway laptop with a 4200rpm drive to capture DV and haven't had even 1 dropped frame in 4 projects...not one.

4200rpm is fine for capture -- I can vouch for that.

If you had to try to describe it in words....

How much slower...overall... is using a 4200rpm drive to edit with...compared to the 7200rpm... the overall editing...

25% slower?

MORE?

It's not a question of "slowing down" your editing -- it's a question of how many dropped frames.

And to repeat what others have said, adding a second drive will be your best bet. If the o/s decides to do a page swap, odds are you will drop frames.

not so easily done on a laptop

trying to keep the workflow small and easy

the laptop will have a 100gig 4200rpm drive

i will defrag often....


and mostly use dvrack to just capture

using a more powerful system to edit with... but... looking at the idea of the capture laptop as backup editing system as well...

i have an old sony vaio - p3 667 with 256mb ram, 20gb harddisk, running on win98se and editing with premiere 6 and vegas 4. work just fine. if i'm not wrong, how ever fast ide harddisk is, there is still the bottle neck in data transfer. working with laptop, you should look out for is faster cpu and max ram. definately make life easier.

ed

Also, if you're using a laptop with 512 mg of ram, make sure you have some space set aside for your page file (that section of your hard drive that is put aside as "ram" to supplement your regular ram which all ads up to "virtual memory". Virtual memory is RAM + Page File = Virtual memory). DV Rack may not capture unless you upgrade your ram chips to 1 GB or supplement your 512 mb with a hard drive page file.