Is this a good Laptop Configuration?

[Operater]

Hea David,
My laptop batteries are really only good for quick setup, shutdown and get through a power failure.

USB and 1394a/b are good for backup, but barely adequate for editing HD.

You can power up your lap with your own batteries...

[DMS Video]

Rusty,

I contacted the company who "may" build the laptop that has been the focus of this thread. I'm am particularly concerned with how I can use external hard drives as that will certainly be part of my workflow. I'm referring to HD footage (from my EX-1s). Here is the respose I received from the company.

"There are no e-sata ports. External hard drives would need to be hooked up via firewire or USB. For external hard drives the connectivity would be USB 2.0 or firewire. Generally Seagate, Maxtor or Lacie are pretty good choices. The system does have expresscard 34/54 slot. The Sony SxS card will plugs in for easy download of MXF files."

In reply to my questions you said, "USB and 1394a/b are good for backup, but barely adequate for editing HD." Can you explain what you mean in more detail. Do you mean that I really can't edit HD externally with the laptop I described? I'm trying to put together a workflow where I can edit using an external hard drive with the laptop then plug the same external hard drive into the desktop. Putting together the right laptop has become very complicated. Thanks for your reply.

David
DMS

[THoff]

USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 are able to handle 480Mbps and 400Mbps peak throughput, so 35Mbps footage from the EX1 should be a piece of cake. If you convert to Canopus HQ, the bitrate will obviously go up, but even two Canopus HQ streams are still doable if the disk isn't too fragmented.

Here is what I would do: get external hard drives that feature both eSATA and USB 2.0 or Firewire ports -- you can even get all three on one enclosure. Between USB 2.0 and Firewire, I would choose USB 2.0 for more universal connectivity over Firewire's better sustained throughput. Ingest your EX1 material through the ExpressCard slot to the external hard drive connected using USB 2.0 or Firewire, and when you get ready to edit, connect the drive using a eSATA connection to an ExpressCard eSATA controller for better performance.

[DMS Video]

THoff - Thanks for the info. Here's what the integrator suggested using...

http://www2.pny.com/ExpressCard-eSATA-II-2-Port-P2556C328.aspx

What do you think?

Do you have any specific recommendations for an enclosure and also harddrives (or a combo) that I can use (Raid0).

Thanks

David
DMS

[THoff]

PNY is a good brand and that's an excellent price, so I would go with the integrator's recommendation.

For drive enclosures, you could get this Athena Power USB 2.0 / eSATA enclosure. I'm not a big fan of RAID 0 unless you use it strictly for editing and archive your footage and project separately so you don't lose everything if one of the drives goes bad.

What size hard drives are you looking for?

[DMS Video]

THoff

I am still shooting primarily in SD although I have had my EX-1 for a while. So with my current Canopus Storm systems I think I have ten to twelve external drives mostly being 250 - 320gb each. This is plenty of storage for one project in SD. I'm also slowly enterting the world of editing EX-1 footage. So in answer to your question about what size hard drives I'm looking for I would have to say that I need a couple of different kinds. The whole raid thing whether it's raid0 or some other number doesn't really make a lot of sense to me (yet), but I'm learning more each day. The integrator I'm working with is very "pro" raid0 as mentioned in the specs I listed earlier in this thread. You're not the first person to comment that you didn't particularly like raid0. The link you provided looks interesting (thanks). So if I'm editing in SD I won't need a raid. I would think given the prices of drives nowadays that I could use anywhere from a 320 to 500gb. For the HD footage I'm open for suggestions. The shoots we do are typically anywhere from 3-5 cameras in SD. At least two (hopefully 3 soon) in HD. Any specific suggestions?

Best,

David
DMS

[THoff]

One nice thing about this enclosure (any most others) is that the RAID type is configurable -- you generally can't change it without building a new array, but at least you have the ability to switch between RAID 0 and RAID 1 if your needs change.

Storage requirements are something that you will have to estimate, I'm not sure how much space one of your current typical projects takes up. The EX-1 footage in its native form doesn't take up a great deal more space than DV (it's 35Mbps vs. 25Mbps), but you'll probably want to transcode to Canopus HQ for editing. Canopus HQ uses a variable bitrate and 100Mbps or more is fairly typical, so you'd need about four times as much space as with DV while editing.

With RAID 0, if you have two 500GB drives, you get 1TB of storage capacity, and the I/O is divided between the drives to provide fast access. With RAID 1, the same two 500GB drives would give you just 500GB of storage capacity because all the data is duplicated. Reads can come from either drive depending on which one can deliver the data faster, but writes must always be done to both drives.

RAID 0 has the disadvantage that each drive only holds half of the information, so if one of the drives fails, you essentially wind up with nothing at all -- you have twice the number of potential points of failure, so frequent backups of the array to a separate medium are crucial.