Advice for laptop installation?

[drogers]

I am currently editing using a desktop (see below) but have recently acquired a FZ series Sony laptop. I did not acquire for the purpose of doing editing but have toyed with the idea recently. The laptop is a Core 2 Duo 2 Ghz 4 Gb RAM. I am contemplating purchasing a portable eSata Raid drive for it, but before I haul off and do that, I wanted to check with you to see if any are doing something similar. After all, it does run Vista. Is that a killer?

Secondly, is capturing live to the hard drive viable today? The more I read, the more confused I get. I shoot with an FX1 and a HC3.

Thirdly, is anyone using camera control software with their laptop in the field?

I guess that covers a broad range of subjects, but I greatly respect the advice of forum members and wanted to get it before I venture off on my on and possibly err.

I recently retired and intend to spend much more time with my video pursuits.

Thanks,
David

[mattmatt]

Hi David,

I plan to do the same thing, and I have a laptop with similar specs. The E-sata drive is a good idea becuase most internal HDD's in laptops these days arn't reading faster than 5400rpm (minimum spec).

Edius Pro is not entirely compatable with Vista as far as I know. But, it is useable. Apparantly Edius NEO will work with less hassels because it doesn't use a vide overlay mode that causes some of the problems you get with Edius Pro. So I will be using Edius NEO and will have to get used to no Audio mixer, No overlay modes and no 3d Picture-in-picture. Those things can be sacrificed for portability I reccon. HDV realtime editing should be no problem - unless someone can tell us otherwise.

More time to work on private work? That would be awesome :)

[PaulTV]

Hi Guys,

I've got a Sony AR15m 2g duo, 4gig ram, dual sata 160gb internal running vista home, which is happy to run Edius 4.6, although Titlemotion Pro crashes the computer, but Quick title does not. Otherwise it works just fine, it seems to be the drivers for the NX etc which are not available for Vista, so on a laptop running OHCI, there's not too many issues, that said, technically it's not supported.

This machine plays a couple of layers of EX1 HD (1920x1080) with colour correction, before it gets sloppy, but SD footage is really great, many layers and filters.

Paul

[drogers]

Great feedback!

Thanks for the encouraging words. I guess I will give it a try, then. It will be different from editing with a 3 monitor setup, but will be able to do so on the road. Any advice on the raid? I haven't resaearched that very much, but clearly there seems to be good availability.

Let me clarify on the camera control question. I have it in my mind that you should be able to hook up your camera to a laptop and use it as a monitor and view exposure metrics and the like. I know there is professional gear that does such a thing, but I was thinking, with firewire connectivity, that there ought to be software to handle such a thing. My googling has been to no avail, though. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Great hearing from you,
David