Video editing on Dell XPS M140/630m or E1505/6400?

[drbill]

I have edited video for 20 years on my desktop but am considering a laptop for editing of daily U/W footage in the field (I hate backlogs when I return from a dive... er business... trip).

The laptop only needs to be capable of doing simple editing... trimming footage and reassembling it by species. Will probably use Adobe Premiere Elements since I use Premiere on my other two systems. I will not use transitions and will only do minor rendering (as in stills to video).

Does anyone have any experience using the Dell XPS M140 (also sold as the 630m) or the duo core E1505 (also sold as the 6400) for such work? I contacted Dell Sales Chat and received a less-than-informative set of responses to my questions (after waiting on-line for 23 min.).

My biggest concern re: both is the lack of a GPU (graphics or video card) with dedicated memory. Both use an integrated GPU (Intel GMA 900 or 950 I think) and shared memory. Will this seriously affect basic video editing?

If I upgrade to 1GB RAM will any limitations be overcome?

I will simply use the system to capture the day's footage, edit it by species, edit out any unused sequences and then output to tape and DVD.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Scubatooth]

dr bill

i have been building a laptop for me to work on photo stuff and have been using the e1505 as a base and i do know that there is a option for a GPU for that laptop (its the ATI X1300 and X1400 (128 & 256 mb or ram respectivly) so you can get away from the shared memory GPU which in my opinon is worthless even if you max out the ram on the laptop because the system and the video are both going after the same memory.

FWIW

Tooth

 

[miket]

I have an older Dell P4 laptop (Dell 5100) and it works fine for video editing. Try and get one with the ATI or Nvidia video chipsets, they work much better than the intel ones. I used my laptop to edit video when on a liveaboard in Thailand. It worked great.

The biggest issue with laptops is that the hard drives are only 30 or 40gb usually. This leaves only enough room for a couple of hours of video. Getting an external hard drive (USB2 or firewire) would solve that problem.

How has the vis been at Catalina recently?

- MikeT

 

[drbill]

I've been looking at the ATI option for the E1505 so if I can find one at a decent price with 1 GB RAM and a min 80 GB HDD I may go for it. I occasionally use a P-III with 256 MB RAM to do editing with Premiere 5.1 and it works fine, although I prefer my primary editing machine! I'll also be adding an external 100 GB to store much of the edited video.

Vis here has been fairly decent depending on where you are diving. We had about 60 ft at Ship Rock day before yesterday and 30 ft at Church Rock yesterday. Reports from the dive park yesterday were about 30 ft.

 

[5ata]

Hey Dr Bill - freediver from SD..

I would personally say dump the Premiere 5.1 and move to a better editing app. Not to sound crass, but 5.1 wasn't known for being a stable app. I really recommend SONY's video apps as they are very stable - and the price for Movie Studio Platinum edition is comparable to Premiere Elements - and allows you to move to HD if the need arises. I do use PPro at times, but SONY's apps just rock in my opinion... And the amount of system resources they require is much less compared to Adobe's offerings...

 

[drbill]

Cliff- I rarely run Premiere 5.1 but it is still installed on my older PIII desktop. I'm using 6.0 on my P4 and it works pretty well for what I do with it. I've produced about 50 videos with that machine... but it's a bit too heavy to lug into the field!

Have heard good things about the Sony apps.