Purchase the CompUSA PCMCIA firewire card for $39. That will give you two more FW ports and then use external FW drives.

Duncan

Don't bother with a RAM upgrade, unless you absolutely MUST have more external RAM preview. 60GB is plenty for field editing, unless you are planning to capture hours and hours of footage. Just get started and see what you think you need. My advice is to try to keep the thing as portable as possible, and to try to get by without any external drives, plug-in cards, or anything else. Once you add all that stuff, why not just get a regular computer in a small chassis and lug that around?

I'm in agreement with John and gdstaples. While we have monster systems for desktop editing, roughly 60% of my work is on a laptop. I DO like the extra RAM for RAM renders, and for Photoshop, but you may not need this. 1 gig of RAM isn't enough for me, but that's all this laptop allows.
But avoid the extra drive if you can, simply create a partition on the drive, putting media in its own location.
If you do go to an external tank, get something that does USB 2 AND Firewire, because on many systems, USB won't work well enough for lengthy edit sessions for reasons you can read in dozens of threads. Firewire virtually always works.

Cliff

I use a Dell 9100 and it screams with Vegas. I'm not familiar with the 400 or how isolated you might be in the field but I'd suggest using external power when possible as Vegas will suck the life from my battery with heavy rendering etc in about one hour.

Enjoy -

PS: Dells don't operate well at all underwater - especially when plugged in. (LOL)

KB

LOL - thanks boomhower.. ;-)

D400 is a Latitude model (current is D410) - I looked at the specs and my girlfriend did do some upgrades on it when she purchased it - the drive is a 60GB 5400RPM drive which is nice considering that alot of laptop drives are 4200RPM.

While on Dell's site, I do have the option of putting a second drive in (I think) - that's according to their accessories page. I did get an additional battery with it as well which is nice. In addition I did get a car lighter adapter with the laptop so I guess I can do some type editing back at the car.. LOL

I was considering getting an external drive - I do have a WD 160GB 7200RPM drive in a USB 2.0 case that I could swap out to a generic firewire drive case if needed. I do want to keep this as portable as possible - preferably burning footage to DVD's for safe keeping... Any thoughts???

Spot said "simply create a partition on the drive"

That should be the first thing you should do if you are going to edit on a laptop. And backup that partition from time to time.

Terry

What are the advantages of partitioning the internal drive -vs-USB 2.0 external hard drive?

I have a 5400rpm internal and a 7200 rpm external. Am I not gaining anything with the external?

What are the advantages of partitioning the internal drive -vs-USB 2.0 external hard drive?

Partitioning helps mostly with backup. You can do an image backup of the C: drive, and backup your O/S and programs without wasting time and disk space backing up data files (and video files) which are already backed up on the tape from which they came.

For SD DV AVI, 5400 vs. 7200 doesn't matter much for many video editing chores. Both can keep up with video capture and print-to-tape, and spinning faster doesn't shave even one microsecond off either operation. Same is true during timeline playback. You might get a slight increase in rendering speed. Point is, the limit on speed comes from the speed at which DV video plays, not from the disk rotation speed.

7200 rpm sure makes the programs load faster, and definitely makes a huge difference when copying files to another drive.

As for external drives, as I said before, the whole point of a laptop, I think, is portability. The more external drives and things that you have to lug around, connect, power, etc., the closer you get to what you'd have with a small-form "desktop" computer, and you'd be better off just lugging that around. The beauty of a laptop is that you can set it next to your tripod and capture directly to it during the shoot; you can edit on an airplane or in other non-powered locations; and you can set-up and break down the edit with little hassle or time.

I realize that some portable drives are powered via the USB port, but I am not sure whether you can do that with Firewire.

I use a laptop for all my editing, and I would suggest Firewire over USB - They both work fine, but, FW - does do a faster render to for me, when I'm reading from the same drive, the only other thing to think of is the fact that FW doesn't use any CPU cycles, and USB does - I've noticed slight perofmance increases when running mulitple feeds from the same drive.

Just my .02

Dave

Are there any performance issues with repartitioning a drive and putting the data on a second primary partition? I have normally done this on my desktop machines specifically for the reasons mentioned - ie; data backup (seperate partition doesn't get touched if need to reinstall)

Cliff

Are there any performance issues with repartitioning a drive and putting the data on a second primary partition?

I am not aware of any positive, or negative, performance impacts. The data is, of course, on the same "spindle," and therefore performance will not be anywhere as good as when you have two physically separate disk drives.

I do it, no difference that i can *notice* - doesn't mean there's a diff. , but I can't tell.

Dave

So next question after doing some research on HD - what hurdles are there going to be with trying to eventually edit HD content out in the field with a laptop?

Much speculation was raised by pmasters here about what 2006 will be bringing for HD shooting. I am trying to look forward as much as possible about this and make as an informed decision as I can - don't want to spend anymore money than I have to ya know... ;-)

Not much different editing HD with a laptop as a desktop if you use an intermediary or proxy. This is something I do virtually every day. Nothing to know, other than disk space. Intermediary will be approx 40 GB per hour, proxy is 13GB per hour.

Hi Spot - forgive my ignorance as I come from working as a magazine/newspaper photojournalism background and am making the move to video.

When you say intermediary or proxy - what does that mean? It might be the key thing I am missing in my transition to HD.

TIA,

Cliff

When you say intermediary or proxy - what does that mean?

1. Shoot the video in HD.
2. Capture the HD to disk.
3. Create a low-res version of the HD material (this is the proxy - a word that means "stand-in" or "substitute").
4. Edit the proxy as if it were the real HD file.
5. At render time, tell Vegas to render using the HD captured file (so that the results are HD), but use all the information from the edits on the proxy file to determine what to do to the HD file to make the final version.

The advantage to this approach is that a relatively modest computer can handle the editing without having to "push around" all the bits involved in an HD video stream.

This approach (of using a proxy) is something that has been around a long time. It was used extensively in the early days of computer photo editing, when both disk and memory were much smaller than the size of a high-res photo. Many programs would let you do an edit on a low-res "proxy" and would then apply your edits to the high-res version just before you printed. I was briefly involved with a company called Live Picture that took this idea to the ultimate extent with its Flashpix format.

John explained it very well, but you might want to watch this video for a visual of how it works.

John and Spot - thanks for clarifying this.

Spot - thanks for the link to the vid file - I had one major question which was answered - what to expect for the rendering process with Gear Shift. Sounds like planning the render at the end of the day is the ticket. BTW - Can this be integrated with the Network Rendering option within Vegas? I have a couple of Intel boxes with Intel 845WN mobo's and 2.4 Ghz processors in them that would seem to offer some additional horsepower along with the laptop when working in the office. Haven't quite figured out how to go about setting this kind of mini rendering farm but any input on it would be greatly appreciated.

This has made a lot of sense now and am looking forward to more input on this topic.. THNX!!!

Cliff