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!

[Guest 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.

[Midget]

i'm sorry but why are they even considering laptops for video editing?

We had a 3GHz PentiumD on a boggo intel mobo with 1GB of RAM which worked fine (bit slow loading up all the vid segments in movie maker mind) but for the actual editiing it was fine.

[GrumbleDook]

Laptops are pretty ok for editing but if they say they want to do it properly they should be using a second screen (19" or 21"). The files they are working on may actually be better on an external drive yes, but make sure it has a faster speed than the internal drive and try to use firewire where possible. I have had USB lock up before as you can wonder why staff get frustrated only to find the USB drive plugged into a USB hub, also connected is an A3 scanner and a colour A3 inkjet ... and the fact that they are trying to work on a movie whilst using the scanner / printer to copy some A3 sheets ...

 

I am not surprised it locks up. Firewire reduces the chance of stupidity like this being a bottle neck.

 

But yes, the Latitude D series is fine ... D505, D520 ... all very nice and smooth (Avid DVFree and Adobe Premiere)

[mrphil]

why the hell are they using laptops we have a workstation with dual Xeons 4GB ram and a £200 graphics cards with 500Gb internal HDD on a striped array and 2 NAS boxes of 1TB each to store old projects on.

 

I think you could probably get away with high end intel core 2 duos or what ever they are being called this week

[dhicks]

We used to do digital video editing (downloading footage from DV cameras via firewire, so 12GB per hour of footage) 3 or more years ago with Adobe Premier. I can't remember exactly what specification of machine we had, but whatever it was I'm sure you can now pick up the equivalent for under £500. I'm sure any new laptop is equally capable.

 

Whilst we're on the subject of video editing, is anyone using the Samsung VP-MX10 SD-based camcorder at all? I see it's available for around £160, and it looked like it would be nice and simple (point, shoot, bung memory card in PC, no USB/firewire cables all over the place) for children to use. I'm not too bothered about footage quality. Anyone any experience with editing video footage from this device - does a codec need to be installed on the PC for us to be able to use it?

 

--

David Hicks

[Halfmad]

why the hell are they using laptops we have a workstation with dual Xeons 4GB ram and a £200 graphics cards with 500Gb internal HDD on a striped array and 2 NAS boxes of 1TB each to store old projects on.

 

I think you could probably get away with high end intel core 2 duos or what ever they are being called this week

 

Simple fact is they don't want or need a desktop, it's low end editing. I agree it's better on a desktop, always will be but the department want it to be portable, hence the laptop.

 

Apart from that they simply don't have the budget for anything more - hell I had to go begging cap in hand to get them an extra £200 so they could afford a laptop!

[thegrassisgreener]

buy a macbook pro and use I-Movie/iDVD easy

[Halfmad]

We don't buy Apple anymore, did for 5 years - biggest waste of money.

[mattx]

We don't buy Apple anymore, did for 5 years - biggest waste of money.

 

Amen to that.

[mac_shinobi]

buy a macbook pro and use I-Movie/iDVD easy

 

would have to agree now that apple have gone over to intel cpu's etc.

 

Could always get an imac or something else though, doesnt have to be a mac book pro.

 

However I do agree with idvd / imovie.

[boomam]

If they dont take your opinion as gospel on spec over the other staff members, i'd personally question my position at the place.