OT: Bare Minimum Laptop Recommendations

Ecquillii wrote on 6/1/2005, 8:26 AM

I am considering buying a low-cost laptop to do digital video editing with Vegas. Having searched the Vegas Forum for current recommendations, I still have a few questions.

What are the bare minimum system specifications I should consider in a laptop for digital video? I know that recommendations are often toward bigger, better, faster. I want to go in the opposite direction, distinguishing between what is necessary and what is extra. If you have an older laptop or a newer low-cost one, what has your experience using Vegas been?

Would a newer integrated graphics card (like the Intel Media Accelerator 900) be satisfactory for editing with Vegas? Are there problems with shared video memory, and is 512 MB shared memory enough? Are there advantages to having a separate graphics card for video editing? Would an integrated card in a laptop still have a TV-Out?

Is 4200 rpm fast enough for capturing with a modern hard drive? Although the usual recommendation in this forum is to capture to a separate drive, it appears laptop users regularly capture without problems to the same drive that has the operating system. If you have a single drive, has your capturing been successful?

Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experiences.

Tim Robertson

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 6/1/2005, 1:12 PM

Probably you'll want at least a 700MHz processor, though you'll be an awful lot happier with something speedier. 256MB of RAM will do. More is helpful if you often use lots of still images or want to do other tasks while Vegas is rendering.

The graphics card is just about the least important part to consider. Almost anything made in the last 5 years is probably vastly more than you'll need for Vegas. 4MB of video memory is more than sufficient. Unless you need the TV output for playing games on your big television, don't worry about it. The best output from Vegas comes from the firewire port. Having a dual display capability would be nice for when you have a second monitor to plug in as you'll have a much larger desktop to play around on. I would also consider 1024x768 to be the minimum acceptable resolution. 1280x1024 or bigger will make your life easier.

Some laptops have a less than full feature firewire port. You may have to get an external port through a PC card adapter. This will also be useful when you start adding more external hard drive space, which you most certainly will be doing.

4200 rpm is iffy. It's ok if all you use it for is the system & software drive and capture to an external firewire drive instead. If you're going to be capturing directly to the internal drive you'll probably need something faster.

While these recommendations may sound very primitive, lots of people were using something like this as their cutting edge video editing station only a few years ago.

Flack wrote on 6/1/2005, 4:30 PM

I did just that two years ago and bought a mid range laptop with a 20 gig drive and a Pentium 4 2.4 Celeron cpu. Don't get me wrong this laptop has done me proud, but now that I have got more creative and using some powerfull fx's and titling software I have out grown it.

I have just Ordered and waiting delivery of a Sony Vaio A497XP this should have no problems at all with what I need to chuck at it.

Flack

johnmeyer wrote on 6/1/2005, 5:56 PM

This question has been asked many time in the past year. Once again, just about anything will do if all you are interested in is capturing. I still regularly use my 450 MHz desktop computer to capture. Properly set up, almost any computer can capture without dropped frames because the CPU doesn't really matter and almost any disk drive sold in the past 6-7 years will work fine. Having said that, this forum has hundreds of posts from people dropping frames, but the problems, once discovered, usually do not relate to CPU or disk rotation speed.

I regularly capture to my old Compaq Presario 1800 laptop which has a 700 MHz CPU. I did upgrade the disk when the original disk failed and used a 5400 rpm disk to replace the older 4500 rpm. This made a big difference in the general responsiveness of the computer but, since I was already capturing without dropping frames, there was obviously no difference there (can't get better than zero, and in fact zero is the only acceptable number when it comes to dropped frames).

So, my recommendation, if you're trying to just get a cheap laptop to use in the field, is don't worry about graphics card or CPU speed, but get the biggest disk you can get, and if you can, get a 5400 rpm unit, not for capture, but just to make the computer a lot more responsive.

PeterWright wrote on 6/1/2005, 6:00 PM

I have a three year old Vaio laptop with P4 1.6 cpu and 1 Gb Ram - does everything, now including editing HDV at 25 fps thanks to Gearshift proxy conversion.

I never capture to the internal drives - always use external via firewire or USB2.

Tattoo wrote on 6/1/2005, 8:48 PM

Keep in mind that you can "build" your own high-performance external drive by buying a standard EIDE drive (ATA-100 or 133) and an external USB 2.0 enclosure. You can search this forum for hard drive and enclosure preferences and experiences, but you can pick up a high-quality 120GB drive for ~$70 and a nice enclosure for ~$30.

This gives you extra performance over what you can get in a laptop drive, extra space over what your laptop has, and much cheaper than a comparable attempt to upgrade the internal drive on your budget laptop.

You can also search this forum to see if you think a USB or Firewire enclosure would work best for you.

Coursedesign wrote on 6/1/2005, 9:21 PM

Just remember that anything with a USB interface relies on the CPU to do the data shuffling.

Firewire doesn't, so if you need CPU cycles for faster rendering this is a better choice.

Ecquillii wrote on 6/2/2005, 3:26 PM

Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful responses. My concerns were around both capturing and editing. My gleanings from the advice given here:

1. Processor speed is not important; even 450 MHz will do.
2. 256 MB of RAM is enough, although more is helpful.
3. A graphics card is not needed; 4 MB video memory is more than sufficient.
4. A 4200 rpm hard drive is iffy but depending upon the system still sufficiently fast for capturing without dropping frames; 5400 rpm is better for a more responsive system; the most common recommendation is to capture to an external hard drive (as an inexpensive alternative, buy an external USB 2.0 enclosure to use with standard EIDE drives).
5. Capture hard disk size: get the biggest you can afford.
6. An integrated firewire port may not be full-featured; use a firewire PC card adapter.
7. Minimum LCD resolution: 1024 x 768; 1280 x 1024 or higher is better.

The draw of bigger is so powerful that it can be difficult to discern what is truly necessary. Your experiences with bare minimum laptop requirements for digital video editing with Vegas have freed me to go small.

Tim Robertson