Aquiring Video Direct To Laptop......

beatnik wrote on 6/17/2003, 12:17 PM

I do multicam shoots, I hate that it takes 3 hours to capture 3 videos to the Vegas time line. I am looking at capturing direct to disk. I have seen some of the direct to disk media out there such as Capdv, Sony's etc and they seem to be about $1,500 to $2,000
(CDN). My thoughts are to by 3 laptops at $1,500 apiece and use them to capture direct
to disk. I know that the laptops are MUCH bigger than the other media but at least I will
have 3 more computers to do other work on such as rendering 3 (actually 4, including my main desktop) videos at once (in case I get busy with more than one project!)

I guess what I am looking for is some advice, pro's, con's, experiences.

Thanks

Alex

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 6/17/2003, 1:31 PM

I wouldn't get laptops I have found them to be pretty useless in the editing world since they are so hard to upgrade and usually come with smaller hard drives. I get at least 1 person a week that brings in their laptop with all their video on it, and they still have 10 minutes left of footage to capture but they are out of hard drive space and expect me to be able to cram 10 minutes more on there, plus all the rendered files without deleting anything. What I would do is get a few of those little shuttle PC's, put a huge hard drive in each of them and use them to capture directly to, it will probably be about half the price of a laptop

24Peter wrote on 6/17/2003, 3:03 PM

The laptops are a good idea - if you can capture direct in Vegas (I haven't tried it yet but will.) There are also a few cheaper hard disk capture device solutions. ADS has one but it has some weird format. Then there's this one: http://www.shining.com/

I think the Shining is around $800. But today you can get a laptop with a 40-60GB hard drive (3-4.5 hrs of DV video) and a fast processor for $1500. Let us know how it works.