What is th Ideal Laptop for Video Editing?

[hiphop112]

Please Help!

I've got some money available from work for the purchase of a computer. I can get whatever I want, and the budget is pretty loose - up to $3000. I can get a laptop or desktop, but was thinking that a laptop might be better because I could take it home and do some editing of my HV20 footage which is currently tied up in DV tapes. Currently, this is basic family footage and work related footage that would only need basic editing (i.e. cropping, moving sections around) and not much else.

Also, I would like to transfer family home videos in various formats (VHS-C, VHS) to digital for editing and preservation.

I would appreciate any thoughts on recommended specs/hardware/software that would make for relatively easy and quick work of these tasks. (I'm strongly partial to PCs but would be willing to try Apple if it made a huge difference.)

[iddy92]

usually for me i dont really care about the brand of the laptop- i'm more concerned with the specs- so here is what i have that i think it's more than adequate. I have a Dell E1505. the new model is Dell E1520. Do not get AMD chipset as even the lowest Intel Core 2 Duo beat the highest rated AMD chip in term of video rendering. a package i would recommend runs about 1200.

if you dont mind spending more money (like around 2000-2500), i would suggest Dell XPS M1330 because not only that it's light (especially if you have an LED backlit LCD screen), but it also has HDMI output, which at this time is the ONLY laptop that has HDMI output. and it looks COOL........


so here is the spec i would suggest

Core 2 Duo T7300 or above (at least 2ghz and up)
2-3 Gig of RAM (4 gig is a waste since vista 32bit only see up to 3.5gig)
160-250gig SATA HD (7200RPM if possible)- use it to capture your clips
GeForce video card (purevideo technology allows better HD playback)
DVDWriter (or Blue-Ray if you so incline)
Wireless G, Bluetooth
Firewire (iLink), Memory card slots (SD), HDMI or DVI out
9-Cell Battery (extended battery life)
LED LCD with VGA Cam or LCD with highest resolution possible.
Vista Home Premium



Currently, my E1505 has this spec
Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2ghz
2 Gig RAM
80GIG SATA HD
DVD Writer
1280x800 LCD
ATI X1400 128meg Video Card
VGA out
firewire, usb, memory slots.
Home premium

for my system, i have after effects and premiere pro 2.0 loaded and although it takes a while to start up, but it's fairly quickly in term of video rendering.

oh, definitely get an USB Hard drive (500Gig+). capture the video into your laptop hard drive and then copy it to USB hard drive. but you can always directly capture to your USB hard drive since the constant throughput for a usb hard drive is 25-30 megs per sec so it's more than enough to capture the movie from the camcorder.

[Stefan_hv20]

oh, definitely get an USB Hard drive (500Gig+). capture the video into your laptop hard drive and then copy it to USB hard drive. but you can always directly capture to your USB hard drive since the constant throughput for a usb hard drive is 25-30 megs per sec so it's more than enough to capture the movie from the camcorder.



I have an 3 years old Dell Latitude D600 laptop and with it's 1,7GHz Centrino (so no Core2 duo or what so ever...) 512MB RAM, 64MB Videocard and 80GB harddrive my video editing program starts up real slow, but when it's loaded (I use Pinnacle Studio 11 Ultimate) it runs fairly smooth, altough some actions are a bit slow. I also use a 320GB 7200RPM USB harddrive to capture directly to it and it works great!

Just have to save up for a new laptop or desktop, especially when I want to capture HD video...

[iddy92]

oh, i did not mention this, but i am using my e1505 laptop to capture and edit footage from HV20.

HDV rendering definitely takes much longer than DV but my desktop isnt that much faster either (2.6ghz core 2 duo with 4gb RAM)

[SenorKaffee]

I think the bottleneck of a laptop editing system is the internal hard drive. External USB2 or Firewire HDDs are faster, but you will never get the speed of a desktop RAID setup.

[mbwkrause]

Anybody using an Alienware (www.alienware.com)? They even have a 19'' version. Sounds kind of ideal if you don't have to drag it around the whole day...

[24Peter]

1. Consider the ability to have two internal hard drives. My opinion is you don't need a RAID setup for most HDV editing but having two hard internal non-RAID drives still makes for much quicker renders. (Have your source footage on one drive and then render to a file on the other drive.) There are many models out there now that support two internal hard drives. If you don't want to go that route, then an external firewire drive is probably a good choice (for me USB drives tend to be slower than firewire and internal drives are fastest of all in terms of system bus). The only hitch with firewire is you might need a second firewire port to capture from your camera while capturing to an external drive. Most external firewire drives have a second pass-through port but I don't know how useful that is for video capture. (EDIT: see Luthyr's post below.)
2. CPU specs - processing power is king with video editing so the more the better. Downside is heat/battery life.
3. Screen size - 1280X800 just isn't enough. Get a 17" (or even 19") screen with 1680X1050 or even 1920X1200) resolution.
4. Graphics - some video editing software benefits from a graphic card with separate processing/RAM. Others, like Vegas, don't (Vegas relies on CPU - not graphics - processing for previews/rendering). So a separate graphics processing/memory unit might be helpful.
5. DVD burner - Blu-ray burning notebooks are here and HD-DVD burners are on the way. May want to wait a couple of months so you can burn hi-def DVD's rather than just SD DVD's.

[hiphop112]

I think the bottleneck of a laptop editing system is the internal hard drive. External USB2 or Firewire HDDs are faster, but you will never get the speed of a desktop RAID setup.


1. Consider the ability to have two internal hard drives. My opinion is you don't need a RAID setup for most HDV editing but having two hard internal non-RAID drives still makes for much quicker renders.


Some of the manufacturers are offering notebooks with RAID setups - would this be the best way to go?

[Luthyr]

Definitely get a Firewire external drive. I have yet to find a USB2.0 drive that operates at fast enough speeds to edit from. I have been using a pair of Maxtor OneTouch drives that have USB 2.0, plus 2 Firewire ports. It allows me to chain the two drives together, plus plug in my HV20 and capture to the drives---all from one Firewire port on my PC and laptop.