Older Laptop as a Cam/HD recorder?

jsteehl wrote on 12/30/2003, 1:49 PM

I have an older laptop (PII 300, 256K) and a Sony TRV900 that was dropped and does not record to tape (if does function over firewire though).

Question: Would it be feasible to put in a firewire card with 2 ports and hook the cam up to one and a external firewire (7200rpm) drive to the other. I could run Vegas Capture and record live to the FW drive. I guess it should be feasible but will I get dropped frames?

Anyone using this type setup? I know there are portable direct to HD devices for cameras but they are expensive.

Thanks,

_Jason S.

Comments

riredale wrote on 12/30/2003, 2:36 PM

I assume you mean 256MB, not 256KB(!).

My impression is that your laptop is at the bottom end of the usability scale from a processor point of view. It could probably be made to work as long as you use a program such as "EndItAll" to clean out every other process, but I'd give it 50-50 that you'd have dropped frames.

jaegersing wrote on 12/30/2003, 4:08 PM

Hi Jason. 300MHz does seem a bit slow, but for comparison, my first editing system with a Matrox RT2000 card was a Pentium II 450 MHz, and it could run 2 video streams realtime without dropped frames. I guess the processor does not have to do that much during straight capturing if the hard disks are DMA enabled. Given, the low price of FW cards, it would be worth trying just to see if it works (but I would check the minimum system requirements for Vegas first in case your CPU can't hack it).

Richard Hunter

mountainman wrote on 12/30/2003, 8:47 PM

I use a 633 mhz laptop, firewire card and ext disk from ADS, It drops a frame everytime the fan kicks on. 10 or 12 droped frames in an hour. JM