VMS on underpowered laptop

vectorizer wrote on 11/11/2011, 11:18 AM

I'm accustomed to using a powerful desktop to run VMS (HD Plat. 11), so editing HD has never been an issue. But, I will be at a remote location next week and forced to use an underpowered laptop to do simple editing of 1080i AVCHD from a camcorder, and broadcast-captured 1080i MPEG2. (Laptop has 1-core 1.87GHz Pent-M, 2 Gb mem, slow PATA 4000 RPM disk.)

Would you please share any hints on how to deal with editing HD in a severely underpowered system? Here are the things I came up with (but just guessing, no testing):
1) Turn way down the playback quality / resolution in the monitor window.
2) Reencode the source video, especially the AVCHD source, into an easily-digested format before bringing it into VMS. I was thinking of using the lossless "lagarith" codec, which I've used before with VMS.
3) Stay away from any fancy transitions or effects; just use cross dissolves and fade through black.
4) Maybe an external USB drive just to have a second drive to render to (or from)?

Anything else that would help? Or is it just hopeless to use this laptop to edit HD?

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/11/2011, 12:55 PM

Ouch! A 1.8 ghz Pentium M with a 4000 rpm disk? I'm not sure you will be able to get any work done on that machine, I'm sorry to say.

But it sounds like doing what you're doing will streamline the process about as much as is possible.

Do you have any other options, as far as computers?

vectorizer wrote on 11/11/2011, 2:06 PM

No. I'm flying out, shooting an event, and flying back in about 22 hours. The alternative is to wait till I get back home to edit, but I wanted to get at least a rough edit onto YouTube the same day as the event.

I own two laptops, but the other one is much older.

Getting up on the 'net on the same day is a matter of pride, not necessity. But that doesn't mean it isn't important to do. :-)

vectorizer wrote on 11/13/2011, 5:24 PM

I might be able to borrow my work laptop: a Lenovo T400, core2 duo T9400 2.53GHz, 4Gb, 7200RPM SATA drive. But I have to install Win7 x64.

Do you think this would be adequate to edit AVCHD 1080i directly on the timeline? Or would I still need to reencode to lossless (or use VMS proxy editing)?

Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/13/2011, 7:59 PM

It's still pretty anemic for working with AVCHD. But it's definitely an improvement.

At least you'll be able to get SOMETHING done -- even if it will likely lug a bit.

Kalvos wrote on 11/29/2011, 8:06 PM

Coming into this thread late. I generally use VMS11 Platinum for small projects. But I have to do a video of my opera. There are three 70-minute performances to cut together into one, 3 cameras each in HD.

My desktop is older. Intel Core Duo @ 3GHz with 2GB RAM, and running WinXP Pro.

What's my biggest bottleneck, as I'm seeing it starting to slow down when opening and working on the project? Sometimes it will just stop responding for a few minutes. And what's the biggest improvement I could make short of getting a new system (not in the finances)?

Thanks!