Questions about 4 Trk recording to a laptop

plasmavideo wrote on 5/19/2006, 11:13 AM

I'm needing to do some field recording and wondered about doing it with a laptop. I need 4 tracks that will be mixed in post.

I have a P4 1.6 Ghz laptop with 512 megs of memory and plenty of hard drive space. I'm wondering if this setup is potent enough to use Vegas and, for example, a USB or firewire audio interface card for 2 of the channels and a PCMCIA, or either a USB or firewire card for the other 2 channels recording onto individual tracks in Vegas?

New territory for me, so any advice would be appreciated.

Tom

Comments

rraud wrote on 5/19/2006, 4:57 PM

I've never tried using two different soundcards at once.. Could be problemactic.. Otherwise any pro USB or 1394 multi-input-channel card should work. In any case, I would do a test before the actual shoot... and above all, have something recording as a back-up... DAT, mini-disc or to another camcorder or VTR.

And it goes without saying;... A father cannot turn down any request on his daughter's wedding day.... oh.. sorry. wrong forum.....
Disable or exit all non-essential applications that may be running in the background like screen savers, anti-virus, anti-spyware, ect.

plasmavideo wrote on 5/22/2006, 12:31 PM

Thanks. I'm going to test using an M-Audio Mobile Pre USB interface and an Audigy PCMCIA card tonight. I tried to borrow a firewire interface to try along with the USB, but that was unavailable. If the Audigy card works, at least I will have a shot at the 1394 unit working. I haven't tried this before, and wanted to give it a trybefore investing in the hardware. I'm trying to replace a pair of Mini-Disc recorders that I've used with something that not only is better fidelity, but is direct to disk.

Let ya know.

T