Laptops for Vegas?
 

Hey I'm just getting ready to plunk down some serious laptop change, and I wanted to hear from some hard core vegas folks what they are using? (laptop-wise)

I love the look of Sony, but I'm ready for whatever gives me a wide screen, and lots of speed and ram. I'm also expecting to put an external drive or 2 on it - just for space. I need something that I can edit with while on the road.

Of course lots of ins and out

Thanks for your tips!

Milt Lee

I'm using a laptop from Earl Foote at PC Nirvana. I think you will find most laptops to be sufficient. However, you should really look for:

Fastest CPU you can afford
1 Gig or more of RAM
7200 RPM Hard drive (the bigger the better)
I have an external drive in a firewire case
Also check the FSB speed.

You could get by with 512MB? I don't see how someone could use all the extra RAM unless doing some pretty crazy RAM previews.

FSB speed (533 vs 800) and Hyperthreading make a few % difference in performance. They make a small measurable difference but you can easily do without them. HT seems to speed DVD encoding by around 15% (haven't tested this myself).

Sager makes some interesting high performance laptops (7200rpm internal drives, high end pentium or AMD64 CPU, 1680X1050 resolution). I don't have any experience with them however.

You could take a look at sager laptops at the sager website (http://www.sagernotebook.com/) or on http://www.go-l.com (go-l just rebrands them and puts their rock in it).

Yes, you *can* get by with 512 meg ram. However, ram is a fairly cheap component - why not go with 1 Gig? It will come in handy when doing ram previews or running multiple instances of Vegas or other programs in conjunction with Vegas.

But in reality, it can get by in 256 meg of ram. In fact - I still have one machine here that is running Vegas 5 just fine in 256 meg. But my newer (faster and most used) machine has 1 Gig!

I'm using a DELL Inspiron 9100 widescreen laptop:

- 1680 x 1050 res (you can choose an even higher res. model)
- Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ - Hyperthreading processor
- 1 GB RAM
- 80 GB harddisk
- DVD burner
- firewire / USB2

Only downside is weight and size. It is being made as a desktop
replacement not to carry around all day (which I don't).

I'm not familiar with the term FSB - what's that all about?

Thanks for the tips! I've got about 3K but if I can save a little here and there, I can get another mic (you can never have too many!)

Milt Lee

You should be able to get a laptop for far under 3K I think.

FSB = front side bus: communications channel between the CPU and other devices

Click here for Wikipedia explenation

FSB = front side bus.

Check out www.powernotebooks.com for a NP8790 widescreen notebook with a P4chip and second optional internal hard drive.

Read the resellerrating.com feedback on them. I almost ordered their notebook for Vegas editing before I elected to custom build a desktop machine. I'd buy a Sager from this company before I bought one from Sager itself.

Interesting article on this company's website about how almost all laptops are manufactured by just a few OEMs and then rebadged as Apple, Dell, etc. And we thought Bogen tripods were the only thing rebadged!

I use a Toshiba P25 S525. It's got a 3.0ghz P4 w/ 800mhz fsb. 512mgs ram, 80gig hd, DVD burner, built in wireless 802.11 wireless, and a sweet 17" 1440x900 WXGA screen...all for under around $1800. Let me tell you- the Vegas timeline looks beautiful spanned across that widescreen. I use it in conjunction with 2 Maxtor One-Touch 200gig external drives. That way I can continue to work on projects when I'm away from home on the weekends. It's great to watch movies on as well....the widescreen aspect ratio fills the screen.

http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...7&ccid=1291021

Glen:

I knew from beggining you had a taste for good art. But now it's proved.

Milt:

I do own a Toshiba P25 as well, mine is a S509. I own it for almost one year, and I'm very happy. Had only to upgrade to 1GB of RAM Memory.

You can go wrong with P25's

You might check out DVLine here: http://www.dvline.com/site/products/laptops.cfm . They have some awesome stuff.
Randy

Sony PCG-GRT390ZP.
Expensive, but, worth every penny.

<<<-- Originally posted by Gustavo Nardelli : Glen:

I knew from beggining you had a taste for good art. But now it's proved.

Milt:

I do own a Toshiba P25 as well, mine is a S509. I own it for almost one year, and I'm very happy. Had only to upgrade to 1GB of RAM Memory.

You can go wrong with P25's -->>>

Hey, nice....how much did the upgrade cost? How did you do it- did you install the ram yourself. I think mine is two 256 chips. If I want to add an additional 512 I have to remove a 256 chip to make room....or is there an extra slot...I never looked. Thanks.

Glen ,my son has one of those great Toshibas, and earlier model with a 2.8ghz HT chip. He's made a very good living with it and Vegas. Just need an external firewire drive and a good set of pro quality headphones or earplugs and powerbooks have nothing on us.

Both CompUSA and BestBuy offer them. One note..
If you decide to purchase at either place, don't let them talk you into an extended warranty, not matter how hard they try. Not worth the money. Most major vendors offer their own extended warranty plan. And guess what, you can send in your pc just as easy as the bozo at the discount store can.

btw...HP has come out with their z7000 series as an answer to the Toshibas. Worth checking out

Yeah when I bought my Toshiba it was between the P25 and an HP widescreen model.

Powerbook? Are you kidding- for the same price my 3.0ghz P4 Toshiba runs circles around a powerbook. Plus the Toshiba can run Vegas. ;)

Glen:

You do have to replace the 2 x 256 in order to upgrade to 1 GB. I bought 2 x 512 and gave my 256's on exchange. Hard to give you a precise quote, but it did cost me around US$300.00 here in Brazil.

If you can affort the upgrade, no matter the cost, it worth every dime. It's became a brand new machine.

Kindest Regards,
Gus

new info?
 

Hi,

This thread is pretty old, so I'm assuming some of you have upgraded. I've just about had it with these pieces of crap desktop PCs I've been trying to use. I'd like to see if I can afford something that will edit Vegas (I've still got version 5) and burn to DVD; essentially, I would like to replace my desktop machines altogether. Being able to take it to town with me would be really helpful.

If you're happy with what you're using these days, care to share? Specs would be most welcome. :)

Wow... this thread was revived after a year and a half!

I like editing on my laptop. I have a Sager, 3.4GHz Pentium 4, 800MHz FSB, 1 Gig ram, two 60Gig 7200RPM drives, and 17" widescreen.

Yep it is amazing, but hey - we always want to move up.

So here's what I'm looking for, and I wonder if somebody out there has put together a system recently.

I'm running Vegas 6.0C, and I want to build a desktop. Thinking I'll be doing HD fairly soon, so I wanted to find out what the right way to go: Lots of Ram or Duel core processor? I'm feeling like a AMD 4800 would be fine, but can I do it with 1 gig of ram? The next thing is a video card, with a duel monitor setup - suggestions? Finally what are folks using for sound cards these days? I've been using a hammerfall DSP multilink for a while, but I think that there are probably newer cards out there, or are there motherboards with decent sound these days? My issue with built in sound has always been the lack of decent - that is quarter inch - ins and outs. So folks there you have - I guess the last piece is a nice quiet power supply. I've used Seagate Baracudas for years so I'm sticking with that.

I'd love to hear if anybody has build a machine like this lately.

Thanks!
Milt

Milt,
John Rofrano has built a system identical to the training systems we use for clients. http://www.johnrofrano.com/pcequipment.htm
this is a smokin', not too expensive system, that he's doing HDV on, as are we for clients that come to Utah for training.

Colfax International builds these very nicely for video, so does Velocity Micro. Colfax has outstanding customer support, and while Velocity has a slightly nicer case, they have the crappiest customer support I've ever encountered. We ended up building 4 of our own after the Velocity Micro experience.

In my opinion, you could save a lot of money off Johnny's configuration and not notice anything. Some of the parts are premium-priced and don't really make a difference for video editing.

In particular, the premium/low-latency RAM and the 10k rpm Raptor.

low latency RAM doesn't make a difference
hard drive speed on rendering

The motherboard you should be able to save money on. I never really understood the point of the premium-priced motherboards... that have lots of features you probably won't use.

For low noise, silentpcreview.com has lots of great info on what parts are quiet. Last time I checked seasonic had quiet PSUs, and samsung hard drives are the quietest (followed by seagate) [rubber grommeting is one way to reduce hard drive noise, as is enabling AAM].

2- RAM: If you run many programs at once (i.e. multiple instances of vegas, photoshop in background, web browser, etc.) then more RAM will help. Otherwise 1GB should be fine. As far as I know, HD(V) doesn't make a difference in RAM consumption.

3-Motherboard sound: Unless it's digital in/out, analog sound will always be compromised by interference from everything else on the motherboard. You can hear interference when transferring files over the network or whatever.

Thanks guys - I hadn't seen the m-audio 410 and it looks very very hot. Exciting to say the least. I'm also going to check out the whole - low noise/no noise thing as I'm tired of not being able to just lay down a voice track without going through a whole move to the other room thing.

I didn't see a monitor there - suggestions? I am hooked on duel monitors for vegas, and I"m even thinking of doing 2 for editing, and an external for preview, and final rendition (did I say that?)

What's the deal with the monitors - are you guys getting a big old plazma thing so that you can see all the detail, or is a smaller but more acurate display a better idea?

Thanks again,
Milt

One more thing - I'm not a gamer so what is the best quiet video card out there for editing? Suggestions?

Milt

Any video card will do. Vegas doesn't take advantage of many of the hardware accelerations created for gamers anyway.
As far as the display, hopefully no one here is using a plasma. Plasma not only WON'T show the detail, but would die a fast, costly death. Plasma has serious problems with burn-in. LCD doesn't. If you're doing HD, you pretty well need an LCD system, but if you're doing SD, you pretty well need a CRT for external monitoring. For the computer monitors themselves, anything will do, CRT or LCD.

Heh heh. Waste not... :)

Edward, I haven't tried to price one with the specs you listed (I'm assuming it's a custom build), but I will. Never heard of Sager until now. Thanks so much!

Yep, thanks for the good monitor info.

As for SAGER, I used one for a year and really loved it. Very fast, good price, alot more computer for the money if you need or want a laptop. I edited video on mine all the time I had it, and it never let me down.

Milt