Adobe Premiere on Laptop

[drbill]

I'm not looking for cutting edge performance. All I want to do is simple field editing of the daily footage so I can clean it up, delete the bad stuff and organize it by species to dump back to tape. As long as a GPU with shared memory will perform adequately, I'm happy.

 

[SmileMon]

drbill, are you planning to edit any HDV?

 

[drbill]

drbill, are you planning to edit any HDV?

That will be in the future. For now it is just mini DV.

 

[SmileMon]

Will you need something rugged or you think you can be gentle with a laptop?

The dells are made stronger (with problem with the screen hinges) so you will need to be a bit gentle with opening/closing the screen.

The lenovo are relatively gentle.

The sager are very gentle.

Toshiba are like the dells more or less.

Panasonic toughbook.. well...

I think your best bet will be to go with a known dell, they have good support, just be extra careful with getting them wet.

A better idea will be to get their "on site" support, their onsite techies are more professional than their lab people and it takes them a lot less time to fix everything.
I'm not sure about the cost difference though, as a company we get different service/prices.
(I'm talking about laptop and server service, their desktop services is different).

 

[drbill]

Heh, heh... well, I must be pretty gentle as I still have every laptop I've ever owned... going all the way back to my Epson Geneva running CP/M (with no hard or floppy drive, just RAM and tape drives).

 

[SmileMon]

In that case, get whatever fits your needs better.

If you're planning on HDV editing in the near future, get something with a HDV resolution to save the costs in the future.

Another thing to consider is the new screens - XBrite, TruBrite etc' - the ones with the glossy screen - they are less comfortable to use in daylight.

For someone as careful as you I would recommend you'll look at gamers laptops, they really deliver maximum performance while keeping the mobility issue going.

One more thing to consider when buying one of the newer laptops (more gentle) is a good case, padded and shock absorbing, a 1000-2000 dollars laptop needs more attention than a 500 dollars one.

Another company I forgot to mention is Asus, it seems that people like them, I have no experience with them as they didn't fulfill my needs.

In any case, reading about the model you want in the forums (professional forums), any problems you might encounter, service, etc' is always a good idea.

 

[drbill]

Thanks SmileMon. By the way, I seem to have highjacked this thread although I think the original question was answered.

 

[ultravinnie]

it strongly depends what version of Premiere and what kind of source material you want to process..
Anything below Premier Pro1.5 ( Premiere 6 , 6.5 Premiere Pro 1.0 ) kan live with a 1.6 GHz machine or slower. it is important that you do NOT buy a celeron or Centrino based machine. Get a REAL cpu in there. Not a slow-poke power optimized thing.
you will need to run off mains anyway while capturing and processing

for Premiere Pro 1.5 and especially 2.0 you NEED a minimum of a 3.2 GHz machine. So all the centrino's en pentium M or athlon mobiles fall out immediately.
A minimum of 1 Gig ram is required. also the harddisk needs to be 7200 RPM. 5400 RPM is asking for dropped frames.

If you want to edit HDV you can forget laptops. The requirements are so high ( Dual CPU 3.4 GHz with 2gig ( absolute minimum) to 4 gig ram , 250 gig disks and nvidia 7800GTX or 7900GT based vieocards ( that you are not going to find in laptops. these things eat more power then the main cpu ). it is preferred to have 3 harddisk or a raid system for HDV. 1 for operating system , one for source material and a work disk.

i found out the hard way. i had a PIV 3.4 ghz with 1ghz ram and a 6600GT card. i could do abolutely nothing. preview was shaking , stuttering , anything you do requires rendering times of 2 to 3 minutes for a 2 second effect.

I now have the adobe recommended system and it flies.

 

[SmileMon]

Ultravinnie, how about this monster?

http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/pentium_systems.html

a bit expensive though..

 

[ultravinnie]

hehe. close but no sigar.
for HDV : dual CPU is MANDATORY not 'recommended' (especiaaly for software like Premiere Pro, Liquid (Avid) and the likes) i tried on a PIV 3.6GHz singlecore. image stutters , transitions take forever.
built a new D950 cpu based ( dualcore 0 based machine ) it flies.

that laptop sure is a nice configuration . albeit the ram is a bit slow ( 677 is recommended especially if you wan tto run dualbanked. the latnecy is too big to have a significant boost with 533MHz)