You might want to take a look at our GearShift tool. It can batch convert all of your HD footage to DV so you can work on it at DV speeds on your laptop. Then before you’re ready to render, it can swap out all of the DV footage for the original HDV footage so the project maintains its HD quality. There is a 15-day trial if you want to see if it fits your workflow.

~jr

Here's some of the links jrazz referred to:

HDV Questions

My workflow for HDV to SD projects

Sony HDVinfo.com

High Def Forum

HDVInfo.net

1.3 GHz is not going to let you have much fun editing HDV using intermediates. You can do it using proxies for sure (identically the same performance as editing regular DV, since that is exactly what you're doing), but the render times for the proxies and for the final render are going to be painful.

I realize that everyone has their budget, but you can get a lot of computer for just $500-800 (if you already have a monitor). You'll get 3-5 times the performance of your current computer.

I agree, with that machine the proxy method is the best option, and I can recommend Gearshift. I use a 1.6 GHz Pentium M, and with that I can edit a Cineform intermediate with reasonable performance; though I have to reduce the preview quality to get a full rate preview even on a single track. The time to render the proxies isn’t that bad (about 3 or 4x, if use the “good” setting), but for the final render (where I use “best”) it’s about 10x!
Mark

Thanx for all the advice everyone! :) Now all I have to do is look up things like 'intermediates, proxies and codecs' and I should be laughing! hahaha As you can see, I have a LOT to learn.

Perhaps I will try the gearshift program to start...I have a desktop also, but will be going on the road for quite some time so wanted to keep on top of editing whilst I am out of the country.

Thanx again! :)

I'll give you a simple answer... you can search around for a more detailed one:

Intermediate: A format which is easier to edit (think "DV like, but HD"). You render to this intermediate (Cineform codec within Vegas), and edit this. When done editing you apply the edits to the intermediate to get your final render.

Proxy: Here you render to ordinary DV (Standard Def) and edit that. Then when you are ready to render you swap the "proxy" with the original HDV file. That way the render uses the original high quality HD file... but editing is faster as it is on the DV file.

You can do proxy editing withou Gearshift by manually replacing files, but if you have multiple files it gets confusing... this is what makes Gearshift worth it.

Mark