Need a laptop for AVI to MP4 transcoding

Paul Anderegg wrote on 8/10/2012, 10:10 AM

I shoot DVCPRO25, ingest it as an AVI, then trans-code it to AVC MP4 for broadcast. For every minute of AVI footage, Vegas takes about 3 minutes to render. I shoot television news, so this rendering time is very bad, I need video rendered post haste! I have a crappy $400 1st gen i3 laptop with no GPU and 4GB of slow RAM. I need help buying a new laptop specifically for rendering DV AVI files into AVC MP4 files......I will be shooting DVCPRO and rendering MP4 files for years to come, so I want a new laptop that will do this, and do it well. I have read that Vegas only utilizes the GPU to edit or render FROM an MP4 source, and that rendering an AVI to MP4 will not benefit from a GPU??

I would really like it if there was someone here who is knowledgeable in this matter to chat with offline, and possibly help me configure a new laptop around Vegas and my needs. Please help! :-
Paul Anderegg

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 8/10/2012, 4:22 PM

I won't try to steer your choice of a computer, but Handbrake renders a lot faster than either of the avc encoders in Vegas and a lot of newsrooms and ENG teams have turned to it. You could smart-render your edited footage back to DV-Avi in Vegas and direct to Handbrake.