Is my laptop good enough to edit hdv?

[scott500]

hi. i have a hp compaq v4000, 1.5GHz, 504MB of RAM.

Is this sufficent to edit hdv orwill it be too frustrating?

Scott

[bluegrass]

hi. i have a hp compaq v4000, 1.5GHz, 504MB of RAM.

Is this sufficent to edit hdv orwill it be too frustrating?

Scott

What is "too frustrating" is subjective. To me it probably would be. Since ram is really cheap these days, I would suggest you max out your ram on this laptop and give it a try. You didn't mention what NLE you would be using. I'm sure that NLEs have different hardware requirements. If you really need to edit with this laptop and you haven't purchased an NLE yet, do some research of the the 5 biggies (2-Sony's, 2- Adobe's, 1 - Pinnacle) that are mentioned on this site and see what the requirements are.

You didn't mention what your disk size is and how much is free. It would be helpful to add an external Firewire or USB drive of maybe 500 gig. Windows can choke a bit and slow down if you don't keep about a third of the size of the hard drive free. Don't forget, quite a large chunk (about 14 gig for 60 minutes of video) will be taken up when you capture your tape to your laptop. It might also be a good idea to run degrag on your hard drive before doing any editing. Definitely reboot before editing and don't run any software but your NLE. This flushes and frees up all the ram that can be made available for your NLE. If you think your system is choking and having a difficult time, try opening up "Task Manager" while you are running your NLE, and look at the performance tab to see how much of the CPU & Memory resources or being used.

[Vinney]

Scott,

I'm running a Dell laptop, with a Turion64x2 cpu, and I don't think it's good enough for me, at times gets sluggish on the NLE. I'm going to invest in a Quad, 8000 series video card, and couple raid hard drives. I figure I'll use CS3 for higher end editing and Vegas Studio Platinum for all other projects. I'll keep Vegas Platinum on the laptop also. It's time to upgrade or invest in a new system, if you can afford to do so.

[nolonemo]

It will work OK if you use "proxy editing," search the forums here. I use VASST's Gearshift ($50) for Vegas and it works very well. Someone on the Sony Vegas support forum has posted a free script for Vegas, but I haven't used that. But a faster machine would be better....

[tiny]

I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.5ghz in my laptop. Also I'm running 2 gigs of RAM. I originally bought this for gaming, since it has a nice video card, and gaming doesn't need a super powerful processor. Well it turns out that I find my self not gaming on the laptop and am now video editing. Stupid me, I could have spent less money and had cheaper video card but a way more powerful processor.

Anywho, what I am getting at is that video editting is pretty tedious on my rig. It really is pushing it to the limit. I can't do real time previews, so it is hard to know if an effect or transistion is working correctly. It then takes forever to do a final render.

So your best bet, if you don't have money to upgrade is to encode low quality versions of the video, edit that, and then swap it out for the high quality stuff before the final render.

Also keep in mind space. If you are doing 24p, once unpackaged you are looking at a gigabyte per minute.

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

No, this laptop is not enough for HD editing. This old CPU is half the minimum speed you need for HDV, and 500 MBs of RAM is not even enough for plain DV these days. You will start swapping almost immediately, even if you start using proxies (at some point you will have to render the originals you see).

IMHO, you need to upgrade if you want to get the HV20.

[nolonemo]

From what I hear, the only people who are really happy editing HDV directly are people with quad core rigs.

I think the OP would be better off (assuming he has an NLE that supports it) spending the 50 bucks on Gearshift or a similar proxy editing tool, and putting the money left over towards a good tripod and external microphone.....

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

I use a 3+ year old hyperthreaded P4 at 3.06 Ghz and it works great for HDV. I get 100% playback speed in "preview" quality on Vegas and encoding is not too bad either (2 GBs out of my 3GBs of RAM is used during export). You only need really-really fast PC if you are editing AVCHD instead, or your preview monitor is a full 1080p one, where the PC has to work harder to playback.

>spending the 50 bucks on Gearshift or a similar proxy editing tool

If he is using Vegas, I have a free tutorial on my blog. I believe it's possible to use that tutorial with Premiere as well. Not sure about other NLEs.

[nolonemo]

I use a 3+ year old hyperthreaded P4 at 3.06 Ghz and it works great for HDV. I get 100% playback speed in "preview" quality on Vegas and encoding is not too bad either

Thanks for the data point, Eugenia (gives me hope that I will end up with an HD-capable laptop). How well does your machine keep up if you add stuff like pan/crop or color grading? My old P3 1.2 can just handle SD at preview quality, but playback framerate dives as soon as I add the slightest effect.

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

This is normal. When you add effects on a video, the speed will range from 1 fps to 10 fps. It all depends on the effects. For example, with Magic Bullet I get 6 fps. If I add Color Corrector, Unsharpen Mask and MB, I get 1 fps. It all depends on the effect you use, and how optimized it is.

And if I add that cartoon effect I use sometime, it's 0.01 fps. Again, it depends on what you add in there.