Can you edit on a laptop? Yes. I have done a couple of short turn around HD short films on my $800 laptop, along with many promos. If you are only editing occasionally and not 18 hour sessions then it works fine. Not the fastest edit in the world and don't plan on doing much AVC with it.

A MacBook Pro can do it. Same thing, get the most power that you can. Again, I wouldn't do it for long periods of time.

Laptops will be more likely to suffer from heat problems when you stress them for long periods of time with video editing. You have to pay attention to keeping the ventilation free.

I prefer a full tower desktop for editing. Again, to keep the heat under control. I also like having lots of drive space (not USB drives) for storage.

Desktop or Laptop, workstation class machines are best, but unless you are cutting for money all day, it is hard to afford one. After that, you make compromises

An edit machine works best when it is dedicated, not loaded with a bunch of other programs that might conflict. Loading six NLEs, two 3D programs and a handful of audio apps all on the same machine can be problematic. You might end up sounding like a couple of the users on this board.

Using the edit system for general business and internet will also result in conflicts or strange behaviors. Some of us have to make that compromise and share the purpose of a machine. The result is when we have strange behavior we can't assume that it is the individual software's problem. We have to start by assuming that our machine is buggered up.

I have run Vegas happily by itself on a $400 desktop. Having it as the only app was nice.

If you are a hobbyist, buy a machine you like and enjoy it. More power the better. Lots of drive space. Preferably three drives to keep system, source, and render separate. I like 6 GB of RAM on a 64 bit system.

If you are doing this for $$, then your budget is way to low. You need more machine than that to really have reliability, speed, and storage.

JMHO

I edit (sometimes) on my wife's Acer Aspire 5610z laptop. It was under $700, has a duel core intel something. I hook my external USB up.

I'd say more important then "what should I buy" you should say "this is what I'm going to edit". IE if you're shooting/editing DV, a sub $600 laptop with a tracball, (possibly) a firewire card & an external USB drive are all you need. My dad captures DV & HDV to his external USB2 drive with no issues.

sick of the viruses

Don't use the editing machine for web surfing.
Short of that, don't click on every dang thing you see, and be more selective about the people whose emails you allow to contaminate your machine,

Some quick points for you to consider:

1. Editing is a light workload compared to rendering. If you are going to be rendering final output you need to configure your system for that.

2. Render machines like to have (1) multi-core CPUs, (2) lots of RAM, and (3) source and output on separate hard drives. You can't do all this with a laptop.

3. Mac systems are more expensive than PC systems for comparable performance.

4. Vegas is a PC product; to run it on a Mac requires some level of virtualization which always has a performance hit.

5. The most cost-effective PS systems I've seen are built by places that cater to gamers; these guys (the gamers) are the true heat-seekers of the industry and are always looking for the best price/performance. I got my system from cyberpowerpc.com and it is solid as a rock, but I did do a fair amount of research to configure it before ordering.

These are some benchmarks from TomsHardware.com. Media transcoding on high end CPUs, overclocked. The much less expensive six core AMD part is one third the price of the Intel six core, and about the same peformance.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-875k-core-i5-655k-unlocked-multiplier,2641-6.html

Hi all,

Thanks for all the advice. Very good stuff. I will get back to everything else a bit later..I dont have much time. I am making the purchase here in NC where I just landed. Is there other places or ways to buy other than Best Buy that you guys know are better. I hesitate buying online.

I saw this and others like it that seem to be enough for me... but I am not sure. I will be doing 75% video.. and other tasks will be web and graphic design.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Laptop+with+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B+i7+Processor+-+Black/9741729.p?id=1218165344675&skuId=9741729


Thanks a million.

Dedicating my editing machine to editing, as many have said above, is the single best thing I've done to improve my Vegas experience.

That said, to stay in budget, I also have installed Sound Forge, Strata 3D, Photoshop, Sonar and little else. Word is great for taking notes, especially since Vegas offers so little in documentation capabilities.

I do keep Firefox installed, but ONLY use it for downloading software from totally reliable sources. No Surfing Whatsoever, and absolutely no email client anywhere near the machine.

A skeletal setup like this not only keeps you safe from Net BS, it also keeps your system snappy in general.

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/HP-Envy-15-1067nr-15-6-inch-Notebook/product/39E0BEAE

This is a great price on a grest looking laptop, the only one I've seen that I want. 40 percent off at the microsoft store, go figure. Anyway, the 1920 by 1080 screen and the battery life would tip the scales for me (beside the price) not sure when it expires though.

Thanks all for some great help and advise. I am hoping to use the computer to edit AVCHD files. It would save me loads of time and obviously the final product would look much better.

1. Any idea if the Comp. Above could do that.

2. What Exactly is the main componate for needed for smooth editing.. ?

3. So could I get a patch tat would make Sony run smoothly on an Apple?

Thanks a lot for everything.

That computer that you listed ddm is out of my price range but looks really nice.
peace

Specs on my Dell Studio Laptop that I use for editing when not using my Desktop PC...

Studio 1749
17.3" HD 900p
i7core 720QM
4Gig DDR3 1066
ATI 4650 1Gig Video card
2-500Gig Hds 7200
1-HDMI Connection
2- USB 2.0
1-ESATA Connection
1- Firewire Connection
All in one card reader
HD Audio
8x Dual Layer +R/-R DVD Burner

Got it for $1099.. Handles all my AVCHD Editing with ease in Vegas

Hey Thanks a lot WarriorKing
That's what I was looking for. If I could ask you a few more questions.

1. What is the GHZ of your processor?

2. What Version of Vegas are you running?

3. When did you buy?

4. Do you like dell?

That HP laptop that I linked to was 40 percent off, making it 1205 bucks. A real steal, I was about to pull the trigger myself but the sale expired.

dmm are you kidding? ugh! I was drooling. Amazing. how did you find that.

check this one out. looks really sweet. If i could get the doe together


http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Laptop+with+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B+i7+Processor+-+Black/9741729.p?id=1218165344675&skuId=9741729

peace

If you're thinking about editing AVCHD on a $1000 laptop, forget about it. As for desktops, Dells are junk (or at least they were in 2004 when I bought the last one and swore that I would never buy one again), and as for the rest I don't know, but one thing I do know is that if you assemble your own computer from scratch you will get much better quality and save tons of money. You have a lot more choice in terms of how you want it to look, how many USB ports you want, what brand of motherboard, RAM, hard drives, etc. Overall you can save about $500 and have a much better computer. For $1000 you can assemble a pretty nice system for editing, but probably a mediocre one if you buy a brand computer for the same money.

Ice, I saw it on bensbargains.net. Great site, they list sale items from all over the internet and it updates continually. The microsoft store has had a lot of stuff listed at 40 percent off but they don't seem to last too long, maybe a day or two. Sure wish I had pulled the trigger when I saw it pop up last night.

I saw the asus deal and that looks pretty darned good as well. I've been hoping to get a 1920x1080 display so that's why the HP looked so attractive to me. The Asus, with an i7 seems like it would make a pretty darn good editing machine as well.

Here are the Specs on the i7Core 720 QM on my Dell..

Intel® Core™ i7-720QM Quad Core Processor 1.6GHz (2.8GHz Turbo Mode
Currently running Vegas 9e Pro 64Bit
Bought it in March of this year
I love my Dell studio,I will probably up my RAM to 6Gig when the price is right....I will state however that when I do Multicam Editing with 3 seperate AVCHD cameras the laptop will struggle a bit , I therefore convert it with Neoscene which solves any issues I may have...But I am very pleased with the laptop....A huge stepup compared to my previous E1505 Dell.

Again, Thanks for the good info.
Really helping me to make this decision. I am about ready to pull the trigger on this one:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Laptop+with+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B+i7+Processor+-+Black/9743709.p?id=1218165770106&skuId=9743709

Am I right in thinking that I could edit AVCHD files smoothly with this machine? Is the 1.60ghz turbo to 2.8ghz.. enough? I thought I needed more but maybe not. I will be running whatever version of Sony VP 8.0 or 8.1 that works the smoothest with AVCHD. I hope I can do that without going to 9.0.. I wouldn't be able to afford both the pc and the upgrade.

Thanks for any advise or cautions.

peace

I was considering the laptop in your link to Best Buy but it doesn't have any firewire and I am lost without that.

Bob

VP8c is good for editing; in fact, it's still my preferred version for editing. However, it's a dog for renders. You'll probably have to render out little segments at a time - 2 min., sometimes less - if your project is at all complex (with feather masks or chromakeys or feathered drop shadows in text or plugins for ???, etc.). That's why I never render in VP8...I now use 9c-32bit if I need to deinterlace, or 9e-64bit for all other rendering. I've never used 8.1 so can't comment, maybe it's better for rendering - good luck.

Because you'll be using your machine for more than video editing, perhaps it'll be OK. With 8c for editing and VP9 for rendering, I never run into a problem even though my machine is loaded with a ton of other stuff. For a month or so after getting Win7-64, I only edited video on that OS, and did everything else in my old WinXP OS. However, I still had the same rendering problems with VP8 that I had had with WinXP, and they do not seem any the worse now that I have loaded up that Win7 machine with perhaps 100 other programs.

And having all those programs at my fingertips dramatically speeds up my productivity. Yesterday, I got to a certain point on the timeline and decided to create a little animation in Sketchup. During the creation, I wanted to make sure that the animation matched the content on the soundtrack, so several times I switched back to Vegas just to refresh my memory for the details. A little later I was doing the same for Poser. And then later, I wanted to get legal images that I could use from http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ - all at my fingertips.

Incidentally, I only get on the web with my VMware/Ubuntu virtual machine browser. Highly unlikely to pick up a virus - if you're careful about downloading utilities to install when back in Windows.

Once in a rare while I download an errant codec or other bit of coding that upsets something that I really need to work. In that case, I simply install a recent image of my boot disk using Paragon or DriveImage XML (free). If you are conscientious, you can do it all on one machine and never have a problem that can't be fixed in just a few minutes - at least that's been my experience.

No worries...The i7Core 720QMs will handle AVCHD just fine, It scores a 7.0 in performance in Windows 7.. Just make sure you invest in a Laptop cooler because the laptops can get pretty warm on the botom during intensive editing and rendering...

..........Am I right in thinking that I could edit AVCHD files smoothly with this machine?

Ice, I have never edited avchd but seems to be lots of posts about it being a pain, before you spend make sure you check out the posts specific to your format, and that it can be edited smoothly at all
good luck

I know, I am probably going to kick myself for it later but I think that the 1TB of storage will help compensate for that..

I actually found this.. has the full HD display.. I think it will be a dream.

http://www.excaliberpc.com/595464/asus-g73jh-a2-17.3-notebook.html

peace