Video editing - am I right

[Halfmad]

I'm in a "discussion" now with a few members of staff about a laptop for video editing, they're claiming they need the school to buy an all singing, all dancing laptop with 256Mb dedicated graphics card, 4GB + and an enormous HDD.

I'm saying they can have a Dell D630 that has 256Mb shared memory on board graphics, 2Gb RAM and a 130Gb HDD, which if they need to can later have an external USB HDD added to it.

Surely there's no need for a powerful dedicated graphics card for video editing, we're not talking about gaming or rendering, we're talking more along the lines of Pinnacle studio (god forbid) and Windows movie maker!

Anyone actually agree with me or am I having a bad I.T. day? 8O

[Homer]

agreed! staff do their editing on their laptops, a mix of D510, 520 and 531's and we dont get complaints.

the rest we do up here on our GX620's with 1.5GB ram and nvidia 8400GS cards! and its fine!


so they can shove it

[PEO]

I would have more ram in the laptops, 256mb is not enough for running XP and video editing

[djm968]

I agree and I would take next week off.... what are they going to do..... sack you?

[Halfmad]

I would have more ram in the laptops, 256mb is not enough for running XP and video editing

That's purely shared memory, the laptop I've spec'd (D630) has 2Gb of RAM

They're moaning about only have a 80Gb hard disk but frankly they should be burning the movies to DVD, which means it's more than enough.

[PEO]

god can't they take your advice and get on with it.

[Halfmad]

since I resigned, nothing I say is considered correct Kev

[strawberry]

i'd tell them that what they are asking for will cost x as a laptop and xy as a desktop. then i'd tell them what i think they need for a laptop to be able to edit.

I'd put it all in a nice email to the teachers, person responsible for allocating funds and the head.

let them fight it out!.

[djm968]

god can't they take your advice and get on with it.

They are obviously "trying it on" when someone questions the £Bill of £4500 for the four hi-spec laptops after you have left they will say it was your recommendation!

ouch… 8O

[PeterW]

Surely there's no need for a powerful dedicated graphics card for video editing, we're not talking about gaming or rendering, we're talking more along the lines of Pinnacle studio (god forbid) and Windows movie maker!

Sounds dead right to me, it is a common misconception that you need a powerfull dedicated graphics card with lots of memory. A fast CPU & 2GB sounds about right. You wouldn't normally store projects on the system's main hard drive, explain that the machine is really a tool for creating projects and if they wish to store them they need to be backed up / exported to external media like DVD / Ext HDD / NAS etc

[Halfmad]

god can't they take your advice and get on with it.

They are obviously "trying it on" when someone questions the £Bill of £4500 for the four hi-spec laptops after you have left they will say it was your recommendation!

ouch… 8O

I think you're probably right, partly because I hold the budget for IT I think they're assuming I'll not give a damn what I spend it on now. Fact is, most of the money has been spent recently so there is none to fritter away on overspec'd computers for staff who don't know how to use it.

[PEO]

I would just ask them what their game is, I cant stand people when they start acting like 2 year olds.

[enjay]

I would agree in general about the spec, but I would up the hard disk a bit - 130GB could get full very quickly (bearing in mind that you've already taken 20GB out for the C:, a further 20GB for the restore image, which leaves just 90GB for video files. If you can spec them with slightly bigger HDDs for not much extra, that would be good.

[Halfmad]

Our images are kept on DVD or USB drives so storage on the local HDD isn't necessary, as far as storing video files. They shouldn't actually be doing it on the local HDD, I try to discourage that as much as possible. They should burn them to DVD or we'll get them an external drive with some form of backup rather than on a laptop HDD. Bear in mind this laptop will be handed around the department and used by pupils, I'll be shocked if it's not dropped in the first year!

[richard]

I've been using my Acer Aspire 1642 WLMi for doing some video editing at home. It has a stock Pentium M 1.7 GHz processor, 2 gig RAM and a 100 gig hard drive. I put all the footage on an external 320 gig drive and have had no problems whatsoever.