my wife's is an older duel core acer, it works great on editing. so that should be more then enough. You'll need a separate HD though.

It's a monster! I know someone who has the precursor to this model. He loves it, but it's quite the pain to lug it around. Believe me ... it's way heavier than you think it is, even when you take into account how heavy it is. I think it weighs more than my calculus, differential equations, and chemistry textbooks combined did. Adding a second drive isn't necessary, especially since it will add weight.

Oddly enough it doesn't seem to have a firewire port. This feature is often missing on lower-end acer laptops. I bought a $4 firewire pcmcia card for mine, also from newegg, and it works perfectly.

My nearly 3 year old Acer Aspire 5004 is about 1/4 what that model is. I use it for capturing and editing SD out in the field very nicely. It's a tad slow on rendering, but then i do most of the rendering back home anyway. It would capture HD perfectly fine too, but i'm not sure if i'd want to do anything more than the most basic cutting on Vegas' timeline with it. It would work in a pinch, but it would be a bit slow. So, that being said, the model you're looking at is certainly way more than enough for getting the job done, maybe too much in fact.